Achieving Real-Time Target Tracking Using Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Target tracking systems, consisting of thousands of low-cost sensor nodes, have been used in many application domains such as battlefield surveillance, wildlife monitoring and border security. These applications need to meet certain real-time constraints in response to transient events, such as fast-moving targets. While the real-time performance is a major concern in these applications, it should be compatible with other important system properties such as energy consumption and accuracy. Hence, it is desirable to have the ability to exploit the tradeoffs among them. This work presents the real-time design and analysis of VigilNet, a large-scale sensor network system which tracks, detects and classifies targets in a timely and energy efficient manner. Based on a deadline partition method and theoretical derivations of each sub-deadline, we are able to make guided engineering decisions to meet the end-to-end tracking deadline. To confirm our design and obtain an empirical understanding of these tradeoffs, we invest significant efforts to perform large-scale simulations with 10,000 nodes as well as a field test with 200 XSM motes, running VigilNet. The results from both analysis and evaluation can serve as general design guidelines to build similar real-time systems.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2006
Accession Number
ADA446896

Entities

People

  • Gang Zhou
  • John A. Stankovi
  • Lin Gu
  • Liqian Luo
  • Pascal Vicaire
  • Qing Cao
  • Radu Stoleru
  • Tarek Abdelzaher
  • Tian He
  • Ting Yan

Organizations

  • University of Virginia

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Sensors

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • C Programming Language
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Science
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Energy Conservation
  • Energy Consumption
  • Equations
  • Infrared Detectors
  • Networks
  • Sensor Networks
  • Simulations
  • Target Detection
  • Target Signatures
  • Target Tracking
  • Wireless Sensor Networks

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Marksmanship and Weaponry.
  • Parallel and Distributed Computing.