Optimal Transmission Power of Target Tracking with Quantized Measurement in WSN

One of the important applications of the quality of monitoring (QoM) on target tracking in wireless sensor networks is reducing the overall power consumption in the monitoring / tracking procedures. We present, an optimal (sensor) transmission power problem is analytically formulated and its optimal solution is found such that a given constraint on the QoM is satisfied. Next, an optimum quantization system for the noise-corrupted sensor observations (measurements) is presented. In this scheme, sensor observations are first quantized into binary levels, and then transmitted to a fusion center where a final decision is made. The significant impact of optimizing the sensor's transmission power and quantizing its observations, is to provide for high QoM while reducing the overall power consumption in the monitoring / tracking procedures. Numerical validation results show that, our suggested methods decreases energy consumptions in the sensor/fusion communication phases by the constraint binary message transmissions. This is well motivated by the bandwidth limitation of the communication links, and by the limited power budget of local sensors. On the other hand, the energy consumed in target tracking is minimized to an analytically optimal level while the target QoM level is satisfied all the time.