Distributed lightweight target tracking for wireless sensor networks

Target tracking is an important task addressed in wireless sensor network (WSN), because the resources of WSN are limited. A distributed lightweight particle filter algorithm is proposed to achieve robust target tracking with low resource requirement in the WSN consisting of acoustic sensor nodes. In the proposed algorithm, each sensor node carries out partial particle filter with its local data and the neighbor nodes' data in distributed manner. Then local results of selected sensor nodes are fused to make final decision. To simplify the computation of particle filter, lightweight sampling and resampling schemes are introduced, where a simple range-free algorithm is adopted to restrict potential area of target's location. The experimental results verify that the proposed distributed lightweight particle filter algorithm can effectively achieve target tracking in WSN with low resource consumption. Compared to previous target localization algorithms, such as maximum likelihood estimation and centralized particle filter, the proposed algorithm has outstanding performance in accurate target tracking and low resources consumption.