On Energy Efficiency in Collaborative Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Network: A Review

Energy-efficiency in target tracking applications has been extensively studied in the literature of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). However, there is little work which has been done to survey and summarize this effort. In this paper, we address the lack of these studies by giving an up-to-date State-of-the-Art of the most important energy-efficient target tracking schemes. We propose a novel classification of schemes that are based on the interaction between the communication subsystem and the sensing subsystem on a single sensor node. We are interested in collaborative target tracking instead of single-node tracking. In fact, WSNs are often of a dense nature, and redundant data that can be received from multiple sensors help at improving tracking accuracy and reducing energy consumption by using limited sensing and communication ranges. We show that energy-efficiency in a collaborative WSN-based target tracking scheme can be achieved via two classes of methods: sensing-related methods and communication-related methods. We illustrate both of them with several examples. We show also that these two classes can be related to each other via a prediction algorithm to optimize communication and sensing operations. By self-organizing the WSN in trees and/or clusters, and selecting for activation the most appropriate nodes that handle the tracking task, the tracking algorithm can reduce the energy consumption at the communication and the sensing layers. Thereby, network parameters (sampling rate, wakeup period, cluster size, tree depth, etc.) are adapted to the dynamic of the target (position, velocity, direction, etc.). In addition to this general classification, we discuss also a special classification of some protocols that put specific assumptions on the target nature and/or use a "non-standard" hardware to do sensing. At the end, we conduct a theoretic comparison between all these schemes in terms of objectives and mechanisms. Finally, we give some recommendations that help at designing a WSN-based energy efficient target tracking scheme.