Optimal sensor and path selection for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

This paper addresses target tracking in wireless sensor networks where the nonlinear observed system is assumed to progress according to a probabilistic state space model. Thus, we propose to improve the use of the quantized variational filtering by jointly selecting the optimal candidate sensor that participates in target localization and its best communication path to the cluster head. In the current work, firstly, we select the optimal sensor in order to provide the required data of the target and to balance the energy dissipation in the wireless sensor networks. This selection is also based on the local cluster node density and their transmission power. Secondly, we select the best communication path that achieves the highest signal-to-noise ratio at the cluster head; then, we estimate the target position using quantized variational filtering algorithm. The best communication path is designed to reduce the communication cost, which leads to a significant reduction of energy consumption and an accurate target tracking. The optimal sensor selection is based on mutual information maximization under energy constraints, which is computed by using the target position predictive distribution provided by the quantized variational filtering algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the quantized variational filtering under sensing range constraint, binary variational filtering, and the centralized quantized particle filtering. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.