Data forwarding of realtime mobile target tracking in wireless sensor networks

Along with the advancement in wireless communications and electronics, in this paper, we first propose a novel application problem in wireless sensor networks. It is the data forwarding of real-time mobile target tracking problem. We mainly focus on the researches of the strategy of routing the tracking data to several sinks with the consideration both of energy conservation and latency limitation. We propose three different heuristic methods [ minimum latency routing, maximum utilization routing and active first routing (AFR) respectively] to research and compare their performance for solving the problems. We also use the traditional Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm to get the lower bound of the latency limitation. As a result, we found that the AFR algorithm is better than others, it achieves the similar latency limitation with Dijkstra's and it get a 1.2-1.5 times of energy conservation than other algorithms regardless of energy supplement conditions. It is an optimal algorithm for this problem.