An imporved decentralized approach for tracking multiple mobile targets through ZigBee WSNs

Target localization and tracking problems in WSNs have received considerable attention recently, driven by the requirement to achieve high localization accuracy, with the minimum cost possible. In WSN based tracking applications, it is critical to know the current location of any sensor node with the minimum energy consumed. This paper focuses on the energy consumption issue in terms of communication between nodes whenever the localization information is transmitted to a sink node. Tracking through WSNs can be categorized into centralized and decentralized systems. Decentralized systems offer low power consumption when deployed to track a small number of mobile targets compared to the centralized tracking systems. However, in several applications, it is essential to position a large number of mobile targets. In such applications, decentralized systems offer high power consumption, since the location of each mobile target is required to be transmitted to a sink node, and this increases the power consumption for the whole WSN. In this paper, we propose a power efficient decentralized approach for tracking a large number of mobile targets while offering reasonable localization accuracy through ZigBee network.