TbOT: A High-accuracy Low-energy-consumption Object Tracking Scheme for Sensor Networks

Abstract

As new hardware technologies reduce the cost and the size of sensor devices, many emerging applications, particularly, biological, earth, and environmental monitoring applications that combine sensors and wireless networks are becoming feasible in many scientific communities. In this paper, we address the accuracy/energy issue of object tracking operation which is a fundamental operation of habitat monitoring applications. Based on the belief that the sensors should take part in making decision for the change of environment, we propose a Trigger-based Object Tracking (TbOT) scheme to minimize the consumed energy for the habitat monitoring applications. For increasing the accuracy and reducing the energy consumption, we explore the conditions under which TbOT is most desired. We compare TbOT against other related work on some critical parameters related to the sensors, moving objects, and networks. Our performance result reveals that TbOT provides dramatically high accuracy and meanwhile saves significant energy under various conditions.