Intelligent Resource Collaboration in Mobile Target Tracking Oriented Mission-Critical Sensor Networks

Mobile target tracking-oriented sensor networks are a special kind of Mission-critical Sensor Networks (MCSN), in which the various missions with the diverse priorities exist. However, it is challenging to achieve real time tracking while keeping the MCSN a long life time with limited energy provision in a complicated environment. In this paper, we develop a collaborative perception and intelligent scheduling scheme, which jointly optimizes the system responding latency and tracking accuracy with the constraint of the available energy. A new hierarchical architecture is proposed to realize the coupled function of perception and computation. In particular, the multi-node collaborative perception scheme is applied to obtain the excellent sensing capacity, and the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play as the edge nodes to provide the computing service for those resource-constrained sensor nodes. To reach the sustained target tracking, we propose an intelligent tracking policy by exploiting the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) method. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed intelligent collaboration scheme can improve the tracking accuracy by 45.5% compared with the random selection scheme. The system cost is also reduced approximately by 17.3% while guaranteeing the tracking accuracy.