Sensor health state estimation for target tracking with binary sensor networks

Abstract

We consider the problem of target (event source) tracking using a binary Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). For this problem, a WSN consisting of sensors that can detect the presence of a target in an area around them, should fuse the information received by the individual sensors in order to localize and track the target. This is a challenging problem particularly when sensors may fail either due to hardware and/or software malfunctions, energy depletion or adversary attacks. Using information from failed sensors during target tracking may lead to high estimation errors. Since failure of individual sensors is unavoidable, there is a need to estimate the health state of each sensor in order to ignore those sensors that are considered as faulty. The contribution of this work is the investigation of three different algorithms for estimating the sensors' health state simultaneously with target tracking.