Abstract
The wireless sensor network is an emerging technology that may greatly facilitate human life by providing ubiquitous sensing, computing, and communication capability, through which people can more closely interact with the environment wherever he/she goes. To be context-aware, one of the central issues in sensor networks is location tracking, whose goal is to monitor the roaming path of a moving object. While similar to the location-update problem in PCS networks, this problem is more challenging in two senses: (1) there are no central control mechanism and backbone network in such environment, and (2) the wireless communication bandwidth is very limited. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol based on the mobile agent paradigm. Once a new object is detected, a mobile agent will be initiated to track the roaming path of the object. The agent is mobile since it will choose the sensor closest to the object to stay. The agent may invite some nearby slave sensors to cooperatively position the object and inhibit other irrelevant (i.e., farther) sensors from tracking the object. As a result, the communication and sensing overheads are greatly reduced. Our prototyping of the location-tracking mobile agent based on IEEE 802.11b NICs and our experimental experiences are also reported.
This work is co-sponsored by the Lee and MTI Center for Networking Research at the National Chiao Tung University and the MOE Program for Promoting Academic Excellence of Universities under grant numbers A-91-H-FA07-1-4 and 89-E-FA04-1-4.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
A. Savvides, C.C. Han, M.B. Srivastava. Dynamic fine-grained localization in ad-hoc networks of sensors. In Procs. of MobiCOM, 2001.
F. Aurenhammer. Voronoi diagrams: a survey of a fundamental geometric data structure. pages 345–405, 1991.
B. Horling, R. Vincent, R. Mailler, J. Shen, R. Becker, K. Rawlins, and V. Lesser. Distributed Sensor Network for Real Time Tracking. In Proc. of the 5th international conference on Autonomous agents, pages 417–424, 2001.
B. Huang, W. Zhang, and Z. Guo. A study of spatial structures of sensor networks and multi-agent negotiation strategies., 2001. http://www.cs.wustl.edu/zhang/projects/dcmp/.
C. Intanagonwiwat, R. Govindan, and D. Estrin. Directed Diffusion: A Scalable and Robust Communication Paradigm for Sensor Networks. In Proc. of MobiCOM, pages 56–67, 2000.
C. Savarese, J. Rabaey, J. Beutel. Locationing in distributed ad-hoc wireless sensor networks. In Proc. of the ICASSP, 2001.
D. Estrin, R. Govindan, J. Heidemann, and S. Kumar. Next century challenges: scalable coordination in sensor networks. In Proc. of MobiCOM, pages 263–270, 1999.
G. J. Pottie and W. J. Kaiser. Wireless integrated network sensors. Communications of the ACM, 43(5):51–58, 2000.
Hairong Qi, S.S. Iyengar, and K. Chakrabarty. Multiresolution data integration using mobile agents in distributed sensor networks. IEEE Tran. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, 31(3): 383–391, 2001.
J. O’Rourke. Computational geometry column 15. International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications, 2(2):215–217, 1992.
J. Rabaey, J. Ammer, J.L. da Silva Jr., D. Patel. Picoradio: Ad-hoc wireless networking of ubiquitous low-energy sensor/monitor nodes. In VLSI, 2000. Proceedings. IEEE Computer Society Workshop, pages 9–12, 2000.
D. B. Johnson and D. A. Maltz. Dynamic source routing in ad hoc wireless networks. In Imielinski and Korth, editors, Mobile Computing, volume 353. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
K. Chakrabarty, S.S. Iyengar, Hairong Qi, and Eungchun Cho. Coding theory framework for target location in distributed sensor networks. In Proc. Intl. Symposium on Information Technology: Coding and Computing, pages 130–134, 2001.
Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin. GPS-less low-cost outdoor localization for very small devices. In IEEE Personal Communications, pages 28–34, 2000.
P. Enge, and P. Misra. Special issue on GPS: The global positioning system. In Proc. of the IEEE, pages 3–15, 1999.
Paramvir Bahl, and Venkata N. Padmanabhan. Radar: an in-building rf-based user location and tracking system. In INFOCOM, pages 775–784, 2000.
S. Meguerdichian, F. Koushanfar, G. Qu, and M. Potkonjak. Exposure in wireless Ad-Hoc sensor networks. In Proc. of MobiCOM, pages 139–150, 2001.
S. Meguerdichian, F. Koushanfar, M. Potkonjak, and M. Srivastava. Coverage Problems in Wireless Ad-hoc Sensor Networks. In Proc. of NFOCOM, pages 1380–1387, 2001.
S. Meguerdichian, S. Slijepcevic, V. Karayan and M. Potkonjak. Localized algorithms in wireless ad-hoc networks: location discovery and sensor exposure. In Proc. of MobiHOC, pages 106–116, 2001.
Y.-C. Tseng, S.-P. Kuo, H.-W. Lee, and C.-F. Huang. A mobile-agent approach for location tracking in a wireless sensor network. In Int’l Computer Symp., 2002.
van Diggelen, F. Indoor gps theory & implementation. In Position Location and Navigation Symposium, 2002 IEEE, pages 240–247, 2002.
K. Whitehouse and D. Culler. Calibration as parameter estimation in sensor networks. In Proceedings of the first ACM international workshop on Wireless sensor networks and applications, pages 59–67, 2002.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Tseng, YC., Kuo, SP., Lee, HW., Huang, CF. (2003). Location Tracking in a Wireless Sensor Network by Mobile Agents and Its Data Fusion Strategies. In: Zhao, F., Guibas, L. (eds) Information Processing in Sensor Networks. IPSN 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2634. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36978-3_42
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36978-3_42
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-02111-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36978-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive