A Reduced Cover Approach to Energy Efficient Tracking

In this paper, we present a novel approach for tracking a dynamic phenomenon. One of the central issues in sensor networks is energy efficient target tracking, where the goal is to monitor the path of a moving target using a minimum subset of sensor nodes while meeting the specified quality of service (QoS). Unlike other tracking methods that are based on computationally complex clustering techniques, our strategy is based on finding a reduced cover of the whole region and then subdividing the reduced cover into sub covers based on the target’s location. The behavior of the proposed tracking algorithm is analyzed through simulation and the excellent performance is illustrated. We study the tradeoff involved in the energy efficient tracking of the target and compare the performance of our distributed tracking algorithms with other popular strategies. The gain in energy savings come at the expense of reduced quality of tracking. Our algorithms guarantee the robustness and accuracy of tracking as well as the extension of the overall system lifetime.