A Wireless Sensor Network Target Tracking System with Distributed Competition based Sensor Scheduling

In existing distributed target tracking systems, usually the next tasking sensor node is selected from the candidate sensor nodes by the current tasking sensor node. In this paper we demonstrate by a real test-bed that such approach may not achieve satisfactory tracking performance due to the long computation time needed for sensor scheduling. We develop a distributed target tracking system implementing a novel competition based distributed sensor scheduling scheme where a candidate sensor node with highest predicted tracking accuracy will be elected as the new tasking sensor with highest probability. The system hardware and software architectures are described and the superior tracking performances of the system are demonstrated with experimental comparison with existing sensor scheduling schemes.