Dynamic cluster heads selection and data aggregation for efficient target monitoring and tracking in wireless sensor networks

Due to energy limitation in wireless sensor networks, clustering is an efficient scheme which has been widely used in building practical wireless sensor networks, and various cluster head selection methods have been proposed nowadays. However, less emphasis was placed on the application constraints cluster head selection. In traditional clustering wireless sensor networks, cluster head is always located at the cluster centre and cannot detect an intruding target since the target first transits the border. Moreover, the data sensed from a target are sent by each cluster head through different routings to the sink so that it cannot be aggregated efficiently near the data source. In order to address these problems, this article proposes an efficient target tracking approach, in which the nodes on the edge of a cluster instead of the centred nodes are chosen as cluster heads so that cluster heads can serve as manager and monitoring node. Furthermore, we choose a collecting cluster head to collect the sensed data from the cluster heads around the target to facilitate data aggregation. Hence, the sensed data can be aggregated near to the data source, which avoids the data long-distance transmission and reduces data gathering costs. Moreover, each cluster head has different lifetime in the efficient target tracking approach according to its location and residual energy to balance the energy cost. Experimental results show that efficient target tracking approach outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches by improving the energy consumption as well as prolonging the network lifetime by about 20% as the 20% nodes die.