Intelligent Sensing Scheduling for Mobile Target Tracking Wireless Sensor Networks

Edge computing has emerged as a prospective paradigm to meet ever-increasing computation demands in mobile target tracking wireless sensor networks (MTT-WSNs). This paradigm can offload time-sensitive tasks to sink nodes to improve computing efficiency. Nevertheless, it is intractable to execute dynamic and critical missions in the MTT-WSN network due to static property. Besides, the network cannot ensure consecutive tracking with limited energy. To address the problems, this article proposes a new hierarchical tracking structure based on the edge intelligence (EI) technology. The structure can integrate the computing resource of both mobile nodes and edge servers to provide high-efficient computing for real-time tracking. Based on the proposed structure, we propose a long-term dynamic resource allocation algorithm to obtain the optimal resource scheduling solution for accurate and consecutive tracking. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the deep ${Q}$ -learning over 14.5% in terms of systematic energy consumption. It can also obtain a significant enhancement in tracking accuracy compared with the noncooperative scheme.