Effective target tracking mechanism in a self-organizing wireless sensor network

Target tracking is an important sensing application of wireless sensor networks. In these networks, energy, computing power, and communication bandwidth are scarce. We have considered a random heterogeneous wireless sensor network, which has several powerful nodes for data aggregation/relay and large number of energy-constrained sensor nodes that are deployed randomly to cover a given target area. In this paper, a cooperative approach to detect and monitor the path of a moving object using a minimum subset of nodes while maintaining coverage and network connectivity is proposed. It is tested extensively in a simulation environment and compared with other existing methods. The results of our experiments clearly indicate the benefits of our new approach in terms of energy consumption. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.