Wireless Sensor Networks A Survey on Tracking Mobile Objects in Sensor Networks

The classical problem of tracking the location of mobile objects in a wireless sensor network is one that has drawn considerable attention from the sensor network research community for quite a long time, as this problem provides an abstraction for many applications that can be built over wireless sensor networks. However, many technical issues still exist in this field. In order to provide a better understanding of the research challenges of this problem, this article presents a detailed investigation of current state-of-the-art protocols and algorithms that have been proposed for this problem. Finally, this survey proposes a distributed data structure and an algorithm to support the find and update operations, based on the Arrow protocol, whose respective goals are to return the location of a mobile object, which periodically advertises its presence by broadcasting a BEACON frame, to a user who issues a query, and update the data structure whenever the object moves.