A two-phase sleep scheduling based protocol for target tracking in sensor networks

Mobile target tracking is an important application in wireless sensor networks, in which all sensor nodes collaborate to discover the target and report its location information to users. To conserve energy in networks and improve tracking performance, the authors propose a two-phase sleep scheduling based tracking protocol. It divided the whole tracking procedure into two phases and schedule nodes differently at each phase. The authors further optimized the node scheduling protocol to minimize the energy consumption with guarantee of tracking quality, and evaluate the method in an indoor environment with 36 sensor nodes. The experimental results show that the protocol performs better in terms of tracking quality and energy consumption.