Target tracking in a two-tiered hierarchical sensor network

An important application of sensor networks is target tracking and localization. To deal with sensor nodes with limited energy supply and communication bandwidth we propose energy-efficient hierarchical architectures for solving the target tracking problem. In these networks, sensors form clusters and transmit minimal quantized information about a sensed event to a specialized node, known as a cluster head. Cluster heads are equipped with capability of communicating over large distances with a fusion center or a base station. We consider two different hierarchical architectures : (a) the target dynamics are probabilistically estimated at the cluster heads and their statistics combined at the fusion center, and (b) the cluster heads perform simple compression rules on the quantized sensor data and the fusion center estimates the target dynamics using these severely compressed data. Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms for estimation of the target dynamics are used. Through computer simulations the performances of these two architectures are studied.