Tracking a Vehicle Moving in a Wireless Sensor Network

This paper deals with the problem of tracking a radio controlled vehicle (RCV) fitted with LED’s moving within a wireless sensor network (WSN). The WSN test bed is made up of a number of Mica2 motes with fixed and know locations and equipped with light sensors. To reduce the overload of communications, power consumption, and allow for scalability, the network is divided into clusters, where members of each cluster communicate with the designated cluster head, which in turn communicates with a sink or another cluster head. When the RCV moves within the motes, a mote in the immediate vicinity of the vehicle becomes ‘hot’, i.e., its intensity exceeds a predetermined threshold, and it relays to its cluster head its ID and the intensity of its reading. The cluster head, in turns, establishes the location of ‘hottest’ mote, and uses this information to dynamically update the new location of the vehicle along with its velocity and acceleration.