QoS framework design for WSN-based tracking of moving targets

As an important resource reservation control mechanism for networks with insufficient capacity, the guarantee of relevant Quality of Service Indicators plays an essential role in both enhancing network performance and prolonging its effective lifetime. Nevertheless, the WSN-specific QoS framework is fundamentally difficult to formulate due to its application-driven nature signifying the fact that QoS requirements vary enormously with different tasks assigned to WSN. Hence, this paper proposes and analyzes the QoS framework for WSN under the specific scenario of tracking moving targets. Existing literature address mostly how to increase the localization and prediction accuracy while determining the positions of different detected targets before making special tracking strategies. However, the unbalance of the overemphasis on accuracy and the overlook of other equally central QoS requirements such as latency can be exparte and devastating for high-order systems with complex dynamics. Therefore, according to the information flow characteristics along the tracking task, the authors divided the task into four consecutive modules, namely sensor deployment, sensor selection, data transmission and distributed collaborative algorithms; and on the whole, and considered three high-level user abstractions of QoS indicators in tracking: accuracy, latency and network lifetime. Further, they seeked to break down those high-level abstractions into each module wherein they propose several related lower-level QoS indicators as well as their supporting technologies and existing protocols to assist the understanding of both general and specific design and evaluation of QoS framework for WSN. Moreover, the authors demonstrate from the global QoS point of view how to guarantee the global QoS by employing feedback control and cross-layer design concepts.