Wireless sensor network for distributed target tracking:practices via real test-bed development

Abstract

In the real world,centralized tracking in a large-scale wireless sensor network (WSN) may not be feasible due to the possible failure of fusion centre and the large communication delay in forwarding measurement data to the fusion centre. Distributed target tracking techniques can be employed by tasking sensor nodes near to the target to perform sensing,target state estimation and selection of future tasking sensor nodes. In this paper,the development and implementation of a prototype ultrasonic WSN test-bed to demonstrate distributed target tracking using the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) algorithm is described. In the test-bed,a mobile robot is used to simulate the moving target,and static/mobile sensor nodes are deployed to detect and track the target. The sensor nodes and robots are equipped with sonar and MICAZ to receive and process instructions. Experimental evaluation of a number of sensor scheduling schemes are reported which shows the superior tracking performance of our distributed competition based sensor scheduling scheme.