Sensor Management with Dynamic Clustering for Bearings-Only Multi-Target Tracking via Swarm Intelligence Optimization

Sensor management is a crucial research subject for multi-sensor multi-target tracking in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) with limited resources. Bearings-only tracking produces further challenges related to high nonlinearity and poor observability. Moreover, energy efficiency and energy balancing should be considered for sensor management in WSNs, which involves networking and transmission. This paper formulates the sensor management problem in the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) framework and uses the cardinality-balanced multi-target multi-Bernoulli (CBMeMBer) filter for tracking. A threshold control method is presented to reduce the impact on tracking accuracy when using bearings-only measurements for sequential update. Moreover, a Cauchy-Schwarz divergence center is defined to construct a new objective function for efficiently finding the optimal sensor subset via swarm intelligence optimization. This is also conducive to dynamic clustering for the energy efficiency and energy balancing of the network. The simulation results illustrate that the proposed solution can achieve good tracking performance with less energy, and especially that it can effectively balance network energy consumption and prolong network lifetime.