Optimising rendezvous-based data collection for target tracking in WSNs with mobile elements

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have referred to many fields involving target tracking systems, however, energy efficiency issues always suffer bottleneck. In the literature, mobility collector is utilised to prolong the network lifetime, meanwhile, data collection strategies are investigated through combining contributed data and transmitted distances. For contributed data, the quantisation technology plays an important role for energy efficiency. Considering the uncertainty of sensing data from nodes, we proposed distributed algorithm to select cluster members to gather data with mathematical analysis. We formulate an optimisation for target tracking to maximise utilisation of data quality by information matrix. As a result, we proposed rendezvous-based data collection (RDC) algorithm which not only integrates above positive factors to track a target but also maintains WSNs' functions. Furthermore, we analyze two stages for data collection in WSNs. Simulations verify that the proposed schemes achieve energy saving and energy balance for target tracking.