Distributed Consensus-Based Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Practical Approach

Tracking is a key application in Wireless Sensor and Ad-hoc Networks. The development of distributed, energy-efficient strategies for target tracking is of practical importance. In this contribution, the authors propose a distributed tracking strategy based on cooperative localization using consensus. Nodes do not need to care about the network topology or the number of nodes present in the network. They use their own measurements as well as the jointly estimated position of the target in order to track it. The proposed approach appears to be robust against small errors in the node positions as well as in the presence of biased or misbehaving nodes.