Study Of Target-Tracking Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks

The technology of mobile Target Tracking (TT) based on targets classification, identification, counting, localization and data fusion, is an intersectional technique of multiple subjects such as sensing, computing, communicating, information processing and artificial intelligence. It has found wide application in both military and civil areas.Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), which integrates the technologies of sensor, micro-electro-mechanism system (MEMS), wireless communication and distributed computing, is a novel mode of computing and a hotspot of information technology after Internet. It will have a profound influence on many areas in 21st century. Internet changes the way people communicate and exchange, while WSN connects the physical world to the logical information world, and will bring on the revolution of the interacting mode between human and nature.The application domains of WSN have spread from the initial military to abundant civil areas, which can be classified into three categories according to the types of data acquired: periodic data collecting, sporadic event detecting and mobile target tracking. Characteristics of low cost, low power, small, high redundancy and multi-function make it more convenient, more reliable and more effective for WSN to apply to state monitoring and controlling, sporadic events processing and mobile targets tracking than traditional systems, and has received increasing interests in related fields.Focusing on the application requirements in target tracking, this dissertation studies the related issues of communication protocols, information processing and localization of WSN, designs and develops a prototype system for further study and practicing. The major contribution of this dissertation is specifically stated as follows.1) Architecture of Target tracking oriented WSN (ATW) is proposed, which integrates the application scenes of state monitoring and sporadic events processing, and offers a general platform for study of related problems in WSN.2) A Scalable Energy Efficient Medium Access Control protocol (SEMAC) is presented to meet the MAC requirements of target tracking in WSN. Results of simulations show the energy efficiency and scalability of SEMAC.3) A Link Quality Estimation based Routing protocol (LQER) is proposed to meet the high reliability of transmitting data in target tracking based on (m,k)-firm link quality estimating. It considers both energy efficiency and link qualities when the route is selected, which makes routing data more reliable and decreases the probability of retransmission, thus saves the energy and prolongs the lifetime of the whole network. Simulation results show that LQER can meet the requirements of energy efficiency, reliability and scalability for target tracking.4) To solve the problem of multi-node cooperation in event processing and targettracking applications, a Collaborative Signal and Information Processing algorithm (CSIP) is studied to realize acquisition, storage, transmission, playback and procession of audio signal combined with discarding packet strategy based on (m,k)-firm under constraint of limited bandwidth, memory and computing abilities. This provides the theoretic and experimental fundament for WSN to process large numbers of data in a short interval. A Simple and Efficient Compression algorithm (SEC) is designed according to characteristics of sound signal, and experiments are performed to prove the efficiency of SEC.5) A Connectivity and Received signal Strength based Localization (CRSL) algorithm is proposed to meet the requirements of target tracking, which combines range-based and range-free localization, and can decrease the communication overhead and improve the localization accuracy. Experiments are performed to evaluate performance of CRSL and results show the gain of performance.6) A DOTNET framework based simulation environment named WSNSim is designed and developed to perform large scale WSN simulations and evaluate the performances of the protocols and algorithms.7) A Target tracking oriented WSN Pro...