Study of target tracking and handover in Mobile Wireless Sensor Network

Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks (MWSN) are becoming increasingly common these days and are hugely used in different applications like remotely monitoring health of patients, wild life tracking, localization and target tracking. In all these applications, mobile sensor nodes associate and communicate with different fixed coordinators. Reliable data transmission, maintaining an acceptable level of resiliency, providing seamless handover, effective target tracking and low energy consumption are few of the key requirements of effective communication in MWSNs. Out of these, the work done in this paper focuses on target tracking and the tangible need to have a seamless as well as fast handover in MWSNs. A few studies have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the IEEE 802.15.4 Media Access Control (MAC) layer in MWSNs. Moreover, the paper proposes three different target tracking schemes as part of the handover activity of sensor nodes to demonstrate the feasibility of experiencing seamless handover procedure. The schemes are properly validated through simulation studies.