Herd-Based Target Tracking Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Target tracking is a killer application in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Energy efficiency is one of the most important design goals for target tracking. This paper proposes a Herd-based Target Tracking Protocol (HTTP) with the notions of node state transition and herd-based node group for target tracking. A sensor node has three states, namely, sleeping state, sensing state, and tracking state. Each sensor node is associated with a weight to be used to make a state transition among the three states. When a target moves into a monitoring area, a cluster node is selected as the herd head that is responsible for reporting the target information to the sink in the network.