Abstract—In this paper, we study the problem of node selection for bearings-only target tracking in wireless sensor networks. The observations of Direction of Arrival (DOA) at active sensor nodes are fused by the filter to estimate the target position for the bearings-only tracking. An efficient node management is necessary to balance the need for tracking accuracy with limited energy consumption. This paper proposes a replace-strategy-based node selection method in the decentralized system. We reconsider the principles for choosing the idle nodes to become active and present a new replacement method for node selection. Compared with traditional methods, the proposed method can avoid the negative effort brought by the inappropriate parameter setting and the refreshing phenomena. The simulation results prove the effectiveness of our method and show good performance in tracking accuracy, statistical average of nodes usage, computational complexity and energy consumption.

Index Terms—Node selection, target tracking, wireless sensor networks, Kalman filter, direction of arrival, decentralized system

Cite: Xiaoxiao Jiang, Jie Jin, Chen Deng, and Wei He, “Replace Strategy Based Node Selection for Bearings-Only Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 11, no. 10, pp. 927-935, 2016. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.11.10.927-935