Energy-Efficient Node Scheduling Method for Cooperative Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Using the sensor nodes to achieve target tracking is a challenging problem in resource-limited wireless sensor networks. The tracking nodes are usually required to consume much energy to improve the tracking performance. In this paper, an energy-efficient node scheduling method is proposed to minimize energy consumption while ensuring the tracking accuracy. Firstly, the Kalman-consensus filter is constructed to improve the tracking accuracy and predict the target position. Based on the predicted position, an adaptive node scheduling mechanism is utilized to adjust the sample interval and the number of active nodes dynamically. Rather than using traditional search algorithm, the scheduling problem is decomposed to decouple the sample interval and number of nodes. And the node index is mapped into real domain to get closed-form solution to decide the active nodes. Thus, the NP-complete nature is avoided in the proposed method. The proposed scheduling method can keep the tracking accuracy while minimizing energy consumption. Simulation results validate its effective performance for target tracking in wireless sensor networks.