Artificial measurements based filter for energy-efficient target tracking in underwater wireless sensor networks

Target tracking is one of the broad applications of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). Sensors of UWSNs are battery-powered and it is impracticable to replace the batteries when exhausted. That means the batteries life affecting the lifetime of whole networks. So, it is worth reducing the energy consumption on the premise of satisfactory tracking accuracy. This paper proposes an energy-efficient target tracking scheme that implements the tradeoff between communication rate and tracking accuracy. Under the distributed fusion framework, this scheme cuts down the weak information of local sensors by set a threshold of the measurement residual. This approach saves much energy but may result in bad target tracking performance. We design an artificial measurements based filter to guarantee the target tracking accuracy. Simulation demonstrates that our scheme can save much energy while lost negligible target tracking accuracy by designing a proper threshold.