Fault-Tolerant Base Station Based Target Tracking in WSNs

Abstract

Target tracking is one of the most important and energy killer applications in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Fault tolerance to any failure is an essential in this context. Hence, we introduce a novel approach toward Base Station (BS) oriented clustering and tracking in WSNs. Proposed method overlooks ad-hoc ability of WSNs to earn energy efficiency and fault tolerance. BS is a powerful energy and computational resource, therefore, we burden BS with major part of clustering and tracking operations. We used 3-D cubic antenna to enable our sensors to receive BS packets from long distance. Also, BS has a good knowledge of nodes energy level, as a result, BS rotates activated nodes and CH to avoid load balancing problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that BS is employed in tracking application. According to simulations, the proposed algorithm is highly energy efficient and robust against target loss.