Energy-Efficient Distributed Adaptive Multisensor Scheduling for Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to uncertainties in target motion and limited sensing regions of sensors, single-sensor-based collaborative target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), as addressed in many previous approaches, suffers from low tracking accuracy and lack of reliability when a target cannot be detected by a scheduled sensor. Generally, actuating multiple sensors can achieve better tracking performance but with high energy consumption. Tracking accuracy, reliability, and energy consumed are affected by the sampling interval between two successive time steps. In this paper, an adaptive energy-efficient multisensor scheduling scheme is proposed for collaborative target tracking in WSNs. It calculates the optimal sampling interval to satisfy a specification on predicted tracking accuracy, selects the cluster of tasking sensors according to their joint detection probability, and designates one of the tasking sensors as the cluster head for estimation update and sensor scheduling according to a cluster head energy measure (CHEM) function. Simulation results show that, compared with existing single-sensor scheduling and multisensor scheduling with a uniform sampling interval, the proposed adaptive multisensor scheduling scheme can achieve superior energy efficiency and tracking reliability while satisfying the tracking accuracy requirement. It is also robust to the uncertainty of the process noise.