Distributed localization algorithms for target tracking in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a group of tiny wireless sensor nodes which perform sensing and sharing this information in collaboration. WSNs have a wide application area including target tracking. Target tracking is the process of estimating a target’s state with the measurements obtained from the target. Target tracking with WSNs involves the design of energy efficient models that can work with a good trade-off between the energy conservation and the tracking quality. In this thesis, we focused on the localization methods, which are one of the key parts in the target tracking process. Our motivation has been to provide better target tracking quality and localization accuracy while consuming similar or less energy. Two new localization algorithms are proposed for an existing distributed collaborative target tracking framework. Our algorithms are easily applicable to this framework. We used simulations to evaluate the performance of these algorithms. The performance results shows that our algorithms perform better than existing localization methods under some conditions.