Energy-efficient adaptive sensor scheduling for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

Sensor scheduling is essential to collaborative target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In the existing works for target tracking in WSNs, such as the information-driven sensor query (IDSQ), the tasking sensors are scheduled to maximize the information gain while minimizing the resource cost based on the uniform sampling intervals, ignoring the changing of the target dynamics and the specific desirable tracking goals. This paper proposes a novel energyefficient adaptive sensor scheduling approach that jointly selects tasking sensors and determines their associated sampling intervals according to the predicted tracking accuracy and tracking energy cost. At each time step, the sensors are scheduled in alternative tracking mode, namely, the fast tracking mode with smallest sampling interval or the tracking maintenance mode with larger sampling interval, according to a specified tracking error threshold. The approach employs an extended Kalman filter (EKF)-based estimation technique to predict the tracking accuracy and adopts an energy consumption model to predict the energy cost. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared to a non-adaptive sensor scheduling approach, the proposed approach can save energy cost significantly without degrading the tracking accuracy.