An energy-efficient algorithm for object tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, due to the rapid growth of sensor technology and wireless communication, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been applied to various applications. Nevertheless, sensor nodes are highly energy-constrained, because of the limitation of hardware and the infeasibility of recharging the battery under a harsh environment. Therefore, energy consumption of sensor nodes has become a popular issue. The purpose of this paper is to achieve energy-efficient object tracking for an arbitrary topology in WSNs. Object tracking typically contains two basic operations: update and query. Most research only considers the update cost during the design phase, or adjusts the structure by taking the query cost into consideration in the second round. We aim to construct an object tracking tree with minimum communication cost, including both update and query costs. This problem is formulated as an integer programming problem. The Lagrangean relaxation method is adopted to find an optimal solution and develop a heuristic algorithm for constructing an object tracking tree with minimum communication cost.