Decision-aware data suppression in wireless sensor networks for target tracking applications

Abstract

Target tracking applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) may provide a high performance only when a reliable collection of target positions from sensor nodes is ensured. The performance of target tracking in WSNs is affected by transmission delay, failure probability, and nodes energy depletion. These negative factors can be effectively mitigated by decreasing the amount of transmitted data. Thus, the minimization of data transfers from sensor nodes is an important research issue for the development of WSN-based target tracking applications. In this paper, a data suppression approach is proposed for target chasing in WSNs. The aim of the considered target chasing task is to catch a moving target by a mobile sink in the shortest time. According to the introduced approach, a sensor node sends actual target position to the mobile sink only if this information is expected to be useful for minimizing the time in which target will be caught by the sink. The presented method allows sensor nodes to evaluate the usefulness of sensor readings and select those readings that have to be reported to the sink. Experiments were performed in a simulation environment to compare effectiveness of the proposed approach against state-of-the-art methods. Results of the experiments show that the presented suppression method enables a substantial reduction in the amount of transmitted data with no significant negative effect on target chasing time.