D-RBFS: Distributed Recursive Best First Search, an Efficient Technique for Multi-Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Target tracking, as a senior application, in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has received great attention from the research community during the previous decade. Many target tracking techniques are concentrated around the notion of cluster and tree-based structures, with additionally a few hybrid methods. While cluster-based tracking techniques have saturated this field of research, we address a tree-based target tracking method in this paper to explore more the pros and cons of this category. Our method is based on one of the informed search techniques, the Recursive Best First Search (RBFS) algorithm, which has the ability to find the best path for a routing problem. We have modified the algorithm as a distributed one while preserving its optimality property, namely Distributed RBFS or D-RBFS. Since D-RBFS constructs a path from detecting nodes towards the sink, it is more efficient in multi-target tacking scenarios, in addition to being applicable in combination with cluster-based methods. Simulation results compared with that of another tree-based method, DCTC, show that despite D-RBFS tries to reach to DCTC results in single target tracking scenarios, its effectiveness is shown in multi-target tracking scenarios. In fact, D-RBFS reduces the total number of transmitted packets to 1/7 (average of sent and received packets), the energy consumed to 1/6 and the execution time to 1/8 when it is used to track multiple targets.

کلیدواژه ها:

Wireless sensor networks ، Target tracking ، Tree-Based techniques ، Distributed RBFS ، informed search