Imprecision-Tolerant Location Management for Object-Tracking Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

An important issue of wireless sensor networks is object tracking, where the key steps include event detection, target classification, location estimation and location management. The main theme of this paper is location management. Because imprecision is an inherent property in object-tracking sensor networks, this paper focuses on the scenarios where users can tolerate a certain degree of imprecision in their query results. We intend to develop a location management scheme that can achieve two goals. First, multiple precision levels are provided. Second, the query cost is proportional to the precision level. To achieve these two goals, we propose a tree-based imprecision-tolerant location management scheme that includes three major components: (1) update and query mechanisms that can support imprecision-tolerant queries, (2) the approach to taking the statistics of imprecision-tolerant queries and (3) a tree construction algorithm that can reduce the query cost and minimize the increment of update cost. Performance evaluations are conducted through simulations to verify the proposed scheme.