Reducing the impact of location errors for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), target tracking algorithms usually depend on geographical information provided by localization algorithms. However, errors introduced by such algorithms affect the performance of tasks that rely on that information. A major source or errors in localization algorithms is the distance estimation procedure, which often is based on received signal strength indicator measurements. In this work, we use a Kalman Filter to improve the distance estimation within localization algorithms to reduce distance estimation errors, ultimately improving the target tracking accuracy. As a proof-of-concept, we chose the recursive position estimation and directed position estimation as the localization algorithms, while Kalman and Particle filters are used for tracking a moving target. We provide a deep performance assessment of these combined algorithms (localization and tracking) for WSNs are used. Our results show that by filtering multiple distance estimates in the localization algorithms we can improve the tracking accuracy, but the associate communication cost must not be neglected.