Information-theoretic approaches for sensor selection and placement in sensor networks for target localization and tracking

In this paper, we describes the information-theoretic approaches to sensor selection and sensor placement in sensor networks for target localization and tracking. We have developed a sensor selection heuristic to activate the most informative candidate sensor for collaborative target localization and tracking. The fusion of the observation by the selected sensor with the prior target location distribution yields nearly the greatest reduction of the entropy of the expected posterior target location distribution. Our sensor selection heuristic is computationally less complex and thus more suitable to sensor networks with moderate computing power than the mutual information sensor selection criteria. We have also developed a method to compute the posterior target location distribution with the minimum entropy that could be achieved by the fusion of observations of the sensor network with a given deployment geometry. We have found that the covariance matrix of the posterior target location distribution with the minimum entropy is consistent with the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRB) of the target location estimate. Using the minimum entropy of the posterior target location distribution, we have characterized the effect of the sensor placement geometry on the localization accuracy.