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

随着传感器设备技术的进步，无线传感器网络（WSNs）已经达到了这样的程度，现在可以部署它们的各种真实的应用，涉及复杂的目标跟踪和环境监测。这些进步主要是由于无线传感器网络的分布式特性，它能够感知、收集、存储、处理和传播数据。然而，这样的应用程序的设计仍然是一个基本的和开放的研究问题，这是因为我们没有相应的一般和广泛的原则，设计目标跟踪通过无线传感器网络，这带来了许多新的一套挑战要解决。与以前的研究相反，我们认为，一个统一的方法，考虑节点部署及其因此引起的拓扑结构，本地化，覆盖范围，数据保真度，数据融合和传播，数据存储，以及可扩展的对象跟踪在多层无线传感器网络是必不可少的网络功能，可以在许多不同的目标跟踪为基础的应用程序类;该方法还可以提高这些应用的性能并显著地减少目标跟踪误差，因为上述问题都是相互关联的，并且在一起部署时都可以被优化。在与我们的合作伙伴在行业中，我们建议设计一个多层的无线传感器网络的目标跟踪协议套件使用统一的方法。 我们将在传感器网络的真实的测试床中验证我们提出的解决方案。我们相信，DisTrac中提出的技术和原型平台将成为未来各种无线传感器网络研究项目和应用的孵化器。我们的目标是围绕无线传感器网络的目标跟踪和其他应用建立一个持续的研究核心。

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.