Abstract—Mobile target tracking through large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSN) demands a large number of reference nodes, which is not feasible for resource-constrained WSNs. This paper proposes a resource-efficient mobile tracking system which integrates connectivity-based range-free approach and Received Signal Strength (RSS) based ranging approach to improve the tracking performance while reducing the specialized hardware requirement. In our proposed system, regulated hop-count values between static unknown nodes and reference nodes in the targeted area of interest for mobile tracking are first estimated in the network configuration phase. Then, location of the mobile target is tracked based on the regulated hop-count values and the available RSS measurements from its surrounding nodes at each tracking point without any extra hardware. Additionally, estimated location is enhanced by correcting with the known information of maximum velocity of the mobile target. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed system offers preferable mobile tracking performance with minimum reference node utilization in both small-scale and large-scale networks.

Index Terms—Mobile tracking, WSN, regulated hop-count, RSS.

The authors are with the Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, 525-8577, Kusatsu, Shiga, Japan.

Cite:Nyein Aye Maung Maung, Makoto Kawai, "Wireless Sensor Network Based Mobile Tracking System," International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 31-40, 2016.