Title: Survey of mobile object tracking protocols in wireless sensor networks: a network-centric perspective

Authors: Marjan Naderan; Mehdi Dehghan; Hossein Pedram; Vesal Hakami

Addresses: Computer Engineering and Information Technology Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, 424 Hafez Avenue, Tehran, Iran ' Computer Engineering and Information Technology Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, 424 Hafez Avenue, Tehran, Iran ' Computer Engineering and Information Technology Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, 424 Hafez Avenue, Tehran, Iran ' Computer Engineering and Information Technology Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, 424 Hafez Avenue, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Mobile object tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has gained much attention during recent years owing to its growing application potential for the ubiquitous society. In this paper, we present an investigation and taxonomy of the state-of-the-art in tracking moving objects in WSNs. To this end, we define the target tracking problem in general and introduce the major design considerations for an efficient Object Tracking Sensor Network (OTSN) in particular. We typify a complete object tracking solution as a system of signal processing-based algorithms in charge of target identification/classification and network-centric protocols as the communication substrate. Our special highlight would be on the discussion of the network-centric protocols built around the notion of OTSN. We outline the advantages as well as the performance issues in relevant schemes and conduct a brief comparative study. The survey concludes with several key open problems together with a summary of directions for future works.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks; WSNs; object tracking; moving objects; target tracking; survey; taxonomy; wireless networks.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2012.049283

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2012 Vol.11 No.1, pp.34 - 63

Received: 26 Nov 2010
Accepted: 06 Apr 2011

Published online: 29 Sep 2012 *

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