A Novel Energy-Aware Target Tracking Method by Reducing Active Nodes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy consumption is one of the main challenges in wireless sensor networks. Additionally, in target tracking algorithms, it is expected to have a longer lifetime for the network, when a better prediction algorithm is employed, since it activates fewer sensors in the network. Most target tracking methods activate a large number of nodes in sensor networks. This paper proposes a new tracking algorithm reducing the number of active nodes in both positioning and tracking by predicting the target deployment area in the next time interval according to some factors including the previous location of the target, the current speed and acceleration of the target without reducing the tracking performance. The proposed algorithm activates the sensor nodes available in the target area by predicting the target position in the next time interval. The problem of target loss is also considered and solved in the proposed tracking algorithm. In the numerical analysis, the number of nodes involved in target tracking, energy consumption and the network lifetime are compared with other tracking algorithms to show superiority of the proposed algorithm.