Coordinated Activation and Reporting for Energy-Efficient Target Intrusion Detection, Tracking, and Reporting in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network consisting of several nodes equipped with sensors that cooperatively monitor physical conditions. WSNs are being used in many monitoring applications. In this paper, we present a new approach to perform coordinated activation and reporting (CAR) for energy-efficient target monitoring (detection, tracking, and reporting) in WSNs. Our approach aims to minimize the response-time by activating sensors (from sleep-mode) that are along the target's path, and then forwarding the information to be reported to the base-station from these sensors along the same coordinated path. If we are unable to meet the response-time deadline using a coordinated path, we split the tracking path and the reporting path in to independent paths, so that the base-station is reported within the response-time deadline. We perform extensive simulations on different sample target-paths, and compute average response-time and network lifetime for each scenario. We also investigate the problem of optimal base-station placement, so as to improve the average response-time in the network.