K-Nearest neighbors tracking in wireless sensor networks with coverage holes. Issue 3 (June 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Liu, Yun; Fu, Jun-Song; Zhang, Zhenjiang
• Is Part Of: Personal and ubiquitous computing. Volume 20:Issue 3(2016)
• Page Start: 431
• Page End: 446
• Publication Date: 2016-06
• Subjects: Wireless sensor networks -- Target tracking -- Energy efficiency -- Delaunay triangulation; Mobile computing -- Periodicals; Portable computers -- Periodicals; Human-computer interaction -- Periodicals; 004.16
• DOI: 10.1007/s00779-016-0918-8
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1617-4909

Abstract

Abstract Target tracking is one of the important applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Most of the existing approaches assume that the nodes are dense enough and ignore the coverage holes which are very common in WSNs because of random deployment of the sensor nodes, block of obstacles, etc. Besides, predicting the target's location of the next time instance is unwise because of the quite a lot random factors. In this paper, we propose a novel target tracking approach without any predicting, calledk -nearest neighbors tracking (k -NNT), to tackle the problems of energy efficiency, continuity and coverage holes. Ink -NNT, only thek -nearest neighbors keep active and track the target when more thank nodes can sense the target; thek ′- nearest neighbors work when there are onlyk ′ nodes (k ′ < k ) can sense the target. A sophisticated rotation mechanism is designed to improve the continuity of the tracking process. In the worst case, none of the nodes can sense the target, i.e., the target enters into the coverage holes, and thenk -NNT recovers by the Round Up mode (RU mode). The nodes on the perimeter of the coverage hole always keep active for a time thresholdt and sense the around environment to find the target in time. Once a node finds the target, the RU mode is over and the irrelevant nodes turn into inactive mode. A series of simulation show thatk -NNT performs superiorly compared with several existing approaches in terms of tracking accuracy, continuity and energy efficiency.