On the Interaction of Network Characteristics and Collaborative Target Tracking in Sensor Networks

In NESL TR , vol:1 , no:1 , 12 pages , NESL , Los Angeles, CA, USA , April 2003.

NESL Technical Report #: TR-UCLA-NESL-200304-01

System-wide energy efficiency is the main driving force of the current sensor network research. Energy efficiency is highly application-specific and as a result designing a sensor network algorithm is also performed under the constraints of a specific application such as latency and accuracy. In this paper we consider one such sensor network application, namely collaborative target tracking using acoustic sensors. This algorithm is an application of a traditional signal processing algorithm on a sensor network. Traditional target tracking disregards the underlying sensor measurement transport mechanism and focuses on the algorithm performance (tracking accuracy) based on parameters such as the number of trackers. Moreover the timing constraints of target tracking combined with the nature of the underlying network (wireless, multi-hop) which drops or delays measurements introduces run time energy, latency and accuracy tradeoffs. In this paper we study the performance tradeoff among the three above-mentioned metrics when we vary algorithm parameters such as the number of trackers and the measurement rate. We find that we can achieve up to 20% error reduction by introducing latencies up to 60ms for the a fixed energy consumption. We give directions about how to exploit directly measurable quantities such as packet receive rate to adaptively change the latency that achieves a specific level of accuracy. We also show that in such systems processing energy is dominating communication energy thus hinting the need for node diversity and hierarchy.

• Vlasios Tsiatsis
• Mani B Srivastava

• PASTA : Power Aware Sensing Tracking and Analysis

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