TPSS: A two-phase sleep scheduling protocol for object tracking in sensor networks

Lifetime maximization is an important factor in the design of sensor networks for object tracking applications. Some techniques of node scheduling have been proposed to reduce energy consumption. By exploiting the redundancy of network coverage, they turn off unnecessary nodes, or make nodes work in turn, which require high nodes density or sacrificing tracking quality. We present TPSS, a two-phase sleep scheduling protocol, which divides the whole tracking procedure into two phases and assigns different scheduling policies at each phase. To balance energy savings and tracking quality, we further optimize the node scheduling protocol in terms of network coverage and nodes state prediction. We evaluate our method in an indoor environment with 36 sensor nodes. Comparing with the existing methods, all the experimental results show that our method has a high performance in term of energy savings and tracking quality.