Hierarchically Coordinated Power Management for Target Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is very important for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) since sensor nodes have a limited energy supply from a battery. So far, a lot research has focused on this issue, while less emphasis has been placed on the adaptive sleep time for each node with a consideration for the application constraints. In this paper, we propose a hierarchically coordinated power management (HCPM) approach, which both addresses the energy conservation problem and reduces the packet forwarding delay for target tracking WSNs based on a virtual-grid-based network structure. We extend the network lifetime by adopting an adaptive sleep scheduling scheme that combines the local power management (PM) and the adaptive coordinate PM strategies to schedule the activities of the sensor nodes at the surveillance stage. Furthermore, we propose a hierarchical structure for the tracking stage. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has a greater capability of extending the network lifetime while maintaining a short transmission delay when compared with the protocol which does not consider the application constraints in target tracking sensor networks.