Survey of Target Tracking Protocols Using Wireless Sensor Network

Target tracking is one of the non trivial applications of wireless sensor network which is set up in the areas of field surveillance, habitat monitoring, indoor buildings, and intruder tracking. Various approaches have been investigated for tracking the targets, considering diverse metrics like scalability, overheads, energy consumption and target tracking accuracy. This paper for the first time contributes a survey of target tracking protocols for sensor networks and presents their classification in a precise manner. The five main categories explored in this paper are, hierarchical, tree-based, prediction- based, mobicast message-based tracking and hybrid methods. To be more precise, the survey promotes overview of recent research literature along with their performance comparison and evaluation based on simulation with real data. Certainly this task is challenging and not straight forward due to differences in estimations, parameters and performance metrics, therefore the paper concludes with open research challenges.