Energy-aware, collaborative tracking with ad-hoc wireless sensor networks

An energy aware, collaborative, tracking algorithm is proposed for ad-hoc wireless sensor networks consisting of randomly distributed low-end sensors and a high-end data gathering node which is assumed to be located at the center of each cluster. The collaborative tracking algorithm is implemented distributively by passing sensing and computation operations from one cluster to another based on an energy-based cost function that attempts to maximize the whole network lifetime. The performance of the proposed collaborative algorithm is evaluated in terms of both tracking error and energy consumption of the whole network. Simulation based performance results for both single and multiple simultaneously active sensors are also presented.