Efficient in-network moving object tracking in wireless sensor networks

The rapid progress of wireless communication and embedded microsensing MEMS technologies has made wireless sensor networks possible. In light of storage in sensors, a sensor network can be considered as a distributed database, in which one can conduct in-network data processing. An important issue of wireless sensor networks is object tracking, which typically involves two basic operations: update and query. This issue has been intensively studied in other areas, such as cellular networks. However, the in-network processing characteristic of sensor networks has posed new challenges to this issue. In this paper, we develop several tree structures for in-network object tracking which take the physical topology of the sensor network into consideration. The optimization process has two stages. The first stage tries to reduce the location update cost based on a deviation-avoidance principle and a highest-weight-first principle. The second stage further adjusts the tree obtained in the first stage to reduce the query cost. The way we model this problem allows us to analytically formulate the cost of object tracking given the update and query rates of objects. Extensive simulations are conducted, which show a significant improvement over existing solutions.