Energy-Efficient Multiple Targets Tracking Using Target Kinematics in Wireless Sensor Networks

Target tracking is one of the cardinal applications of a wireless sensor network. Tracking multiple targets is more challenging than tracking a single target in a wireless sensor network due to targets’ movement in different directions, targets’ speed variations and frequent connectivity failures of low powered sensor nodes. If all the low-powered sensor nodes are kept active in tracking multiple targets coming from different directions of the network, there is high probability of network failure due to wastage of power. It would be more realistic if the tracking area can be reduced so that the less number of sensor nodes will be active which ultimately saves the energy consumption. Tracking area can be reduced by using the target’s kinematics. There is almost no method to track multiple targets, based on targets’ kinematics. In our paper, we propose a distributed tracking method for tracking multiple targets considering targets’ kinematics. We incorporate sensor network properties which results into a novel and service priority based dynamic tracking framework. We simulate our method by a sensor network simulator OMNeT++ and empirical results state that our proposed methodology outperforms traditional tracking algorithms.