DISTRACT: cooperative distributed target in multi-tier heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSN)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

With the advances of sensor devices' technology, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have reached the point where it is now possible to deploy them for all sorts of real applications that involve complex target tracking and environmental monitoring. These advances are mainly due to the distributed nature of WSNs which enables the sensing, gathering, storing, processing and disseminating of data. However, the design of such applications still remains a fundamental and open research problem; this is because we do not have the corresponding general and broad principles for designing target tracking through a WSN, which poses numerous new sets of challenges to be resolved. As opposed to previous studies, we believe that a unified approach that considers node deployment and its consequently induced topology, localization, coverage, data fidelity, data fusion and dissemination, data storage, and scalable object tracking in multi-tier WSNs is essential to network functions that can be employed in many different target tracking based classes of applications; this approach can also improve these applications' performance and reduce target tracking errors significantly since the aforementioned issues are all interrelated and can all be optimized when deployed together. In collaboration with our partners in industry, we propose to design a multi-tier WSN based target tracking suite of protocols using the unified approach. We shall validate our proposed solutions in a real test bed of sensor networks. We believe the technologies and prototype platform proposed in the DisTrac will act as an incubator for various future research projects and applications of WSNs. Our objective is to build a continuing research nucleus around WSNs for target tracking and other applications. The PIs are responding to the growing demands from the public health safety and emergency preparedness department within Ontario and Canada to design a robust and reliable target tracking using wireless sensors infrastructure for critical monitoring of context aware physical environments.