Abstract: Target tracking is a typical and important application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Existing target tracking protocols focus mainly on energy efficiency, and little effort has been put into network management and real-time data routing, which are also very important issues for target tracking. In this paper, we propose a scalable cluster-based target tracking framework, namely the hierarchical prediction strategy (HPS), for energy-efficient and real-time target tracking in large-scale WSNs. HPS organizes sensor nodes into clusters by using suitable clustering protocols which are beneficial for network management and data routing. As a target moves in the network, cluster heads predict the target trajectory using Kalman filter and selectively activate the next round of sensors in advance to keep on tracking the target. The estimated locations of the target are routed to the base station via the backbone composed of the cluster heads. A soft handoff algorithm is proposed in HPS to guarantee smooth tracking of the target when the target moves from one cluster to another. Under the framework of HPS, we design and implement an energy-efficient target tracking system, HierTrack, which consists of 36 sensor motes, a sink node, and a base station. Both simulation and experimental results show the efficiency of our system.

Key words: Wireless sensor networks, Cluster, Energy efficiency, Target tracking, Scalability, Real-time data routing

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