1332 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 9, NO.

9, SEPTEMBER 2010

Detection and Tracking Using

Particle-Filter-Based Wireless Sensor Networks
Nadeem Ahmed, Member, IEEE, Mark Rutten, Travis Bessell, Salil S. Kanhere, Member, IEEE,
Neil Gordon, Member, IEEE, and Sanjay Jha, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—The work reported in this paper investigates the performance of the Particle Filter (PF) algorithm for tracking a moving
object using a wireless sensor network (WSN). It is well known that the PF is particularly well suited for use in target tracking
applications. However, a comprehensive analysis on the effect of various design and calibration parameters on the accuracy of the PF
has been overlooked. This paper outlines the results from such a study. In particular, we evaluate the effect of various design
parameters (such as the number of deployed nodes, number of generated particles, and sampling interval) and calibration parameters
(such as the gain, path loss factor, noise variations, and nonlinearity constant) on the tracking accuracy and computation time of the
particle-filter-based tracking system. Based on our analysis, we present recommendations on suitable values for these parameters,
which provide a reasonable trade-off between accuracy and complexity. We also analyze the theoretical Cramér-Rao Bound as the
benchmark for the best possible tracking performance and demonstrate that the results from our simulations closely match the
theoretical bound. In this paper, we also propose a novel technique for calibrating off-the-shelf sensor devices. We implement the
tracking system on a real sensor network and demonstrate its accuracy in detecting and tracking a moving object in a variety of
scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that empirical results from a PF-based tracking system with off-the-shelf
WSN devices have been reported. Finally, we also present simple albeit important building blocks that are essential for field
deployment of such a system.

Index Terms—Wireless sensor networks, simulations, experiments, performance attributes, measurements.

1 INTRODUCTION

W IRELESS Sensor Networks (WSN) are increasingly being

used in a variety of applications ranging from
environmental monitoring to industrial automation. A
particularly promising military application involves using
WSN for detecting and tracking moving targets such as
tanks, vehicles, and troops. Detection and tracking of targets
is a mature and well-established research area. However,
the current solutions rely on expensive and bulky sensors.
The use of low-cost sensor nodes is an attractive and
complementary approach.
Among several tracking algorithms in the literature that
use nonlinear filters, the Particle Filter (PF) [1] has been a
popular choice. The PF (also known as the sequential Monte
Carlo method) approximates a belief state for the presence
of the target by means of many but finite random samples.
Previous work [2], [3], [4] has demonstrated that the PF can
be effectively employed in WSN systems for tracking
applications. The tracking and detection performance of
such a system is significantly influenced by several design
. N. Ahmed, S.S. Kanhere, and S. Jha are with the School of Computer
Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Building K17,
Anzac Parade, Kensington, 2052 Sydney, Australia.
E-mail: {nahmed, salilk, sanjay}@cse.unsw.edu.au.
. M. Rutten, T. Bessell, and N. Gordon are with the Defence Science and
Technology Organization (DSTO), 200 Labs, PO Box 1500, Edinburgh,
SA 5111, Australia.
E-mail: {mark.rutten, travis.bessell, neil.gordon}@dsto.defence.gov.au.
Manuscript received 19 Dec. 2008; revised 2 July 2009; accepted 15 Dec. 2009;
published online 22 Apr. 2010.
For information on obtaining reprints of this article, please send e-mail to:
tmc@computer.org, and reference IEEECS Log Number TMC-2008-12-0503.
Digital Object Identifier no. 10.1109/TMC.2010.83.
1536-1233/10/$26.00 ß 2010 IEEE
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parameters (such as number of sensors, number of
generated particles, and sampling frequency) and estima-
tion of the calibration parameters (such as sensor gain, path
loss factor, noise, and nonlinearity constant). However, all
prior work simply assumes a particular set of values for
these parameters without providing any insight into how
they affect the behavior of the tracking system. In this
paper, we conduct extensive simulations in a realistic
environment to study the effect of the aforementioned
parameters on the tracking and detection performance of
the system.
We consider the problem of simultaneous detection and
tracking of an object moving through a particular target
region. In our system, sensor nodes equipped with acoustic
sensors are deployed in the target region. The sensors
periodically sample the ambient sound and relay the
measured samples to a central base station. The moving
object generates an acoustic signature as it travels, which is
captured by the acoustic measurements of the motes that
are located near the object. The base station runs the PF
algorithm on the collected samples, with the intensity of the
object’s acoustic signal acting as the input. The PF estimates
the presence of the object and, if the object is declared
present, also estimates the object’s trajectory. In this work,
we have conducted extensive simulations of this tracking
system using NS2 to study the impact of various design and
calibration parameters on the tracking performance. The
two metrics that we have used to evaluate the performance
of the system are: track estimation error, i.e., the distance
between the estimated and the actual location of the target
and computation time, i.e., the time required by the PF to
execute. Our simulation environment takes into account
Published by the IEEE CS, CASS, ComSoc, IES, & SPS
AHMED ET AL.: DETECTION AND TRACKING USING PARTICLE-FILTER-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
several real-world effects such as wireless channel propaga-
tion and network protocol behavior such as delay and
packet losses due to collisions. Based on our observations,
we suggest suitable values for the relevant design and
calibration parameters.
To determine the benchmark for the optimal tracking
performance, we analyze the theoretical Cramér-Rao Bound
[5]. The results of our simulated PF algorithm closely match
this theoretical bound.
We have also made significant experimental contribu-
tions by developing a prototype of our tracking system
using off-the-shelf Xbow MicaZ motes. First, we conduct
extensive experiments to calibrate the microphones of the
motes. This includes characterizing the gain, path loss, noise
variance, and the nonlinearity constant, which collectively
form the calibration parameters. These calibration values are
used in our MATLAB implementation of the PF algorithm.
Second, we present empirical results from a real-world
implementation of our tracking system. The results from our
experiments are promising and demonstrate that our system
can successfully track and detect an object moving along a
variety of trajectories. Third, we summarize several system
challenges encountered in our implementation and describe
the solutions adopted for overcoming these challenges. Our
system-level contributions include custom algorithms for
high frequency acoustic sampling, time synchronization,
shared channel access using Time Division Multiple Access
(TDMA), and clustering.
This paper makes the following specific contributions:
. We present a detailed simulation study to evaluate
the effect of design and calibration parameters on
the performance of a particle-filter-based WSN
tracking system. The simulation results conform
with the theoretical performance bound.
. We propose a simple yet effective calibration
mechanism for characterizing the behavior of off-
the-shelf sensor hardware. This calibration mechan-
ism is shown to perform better than other naive
proposals (Section 4.1).
. We implement a working prototype of our system
on a sensor network. Our system can accurately
detect and track an object moving along several
different trajectories.
. We present several system design solutions that
lower the technical barriers for field deployment of
WSN tracking systems.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2
summarizes related work. In Section 3, we provide a brief
overview of the PF and discuss how we adapt it to our
system. Interested readers are referred to a book by one of the
coauthors [1] for further elaboration. The simulation-based
evaluations along with relevant discussions on appropriate
design and calibration parameters are presented in Section 4.
This section also includes a detailed discussion on calibrating
the microphones of sensor nodes. Section 5 presents the
derivation of the Cramér-Rao bound and a comparison of our
simulation results with this theoretical bound. Results from
our experiments are presented in Section 6. Section 7 details
the systems challenges faced during the experimentation and
describes the steps taken to overcome them. Finally, Section 8
concludes the paper.
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1333
2 RELATED WORK
In this section, we present a brief overview of previous work
on using miniature sensor devices for target tracking. The
work introduced in [2] is one of the earliest attempts at using
tiny acoustic sensor devices for tracking purposes. The target
is estimated via triangulation, i.e., comparing the difference
in sound propagation delays from the sound source to
different acoustic sensors. In [3], Gu et al. developed a
lightweight multimodal detection algorithm for mote level
microsensors. They discovered that simple fusion algo-
rithms such as moving averages with thresholds are useful
in object detection using WSN. Unfortunately, both of these
studies assume that the sensor readings are free of ambient
noise, which is a highly unrealistic assumption. In a typical
outdoor environment (especially given the hostile nature of
battlefields), it is expected that the sensor readings would be
significantly influenced by ambient noise. In addition, given
that the sensor nodes are small form factor devices and of
low cost, it is expected that the readings would inherently be
noisy due to their low fidelity.
In [4], Duarte and Hu evaluated different machine
learning algorithms in the context of vehicle detection.
The authors proposed a two level detection architecture to
increase the reliability of the PF. Different target detection
algorithms, such as K-nearest neighbor, maximum like-
lihood classifier, and support vector machine classifier, are
evaluated at a local node level. Then, the results of the local
node level evaluation are passed to a group, which is
formed dynamically. The fusion algorithms are performed
at the group level nodes. However, resource-intensive tasks
such as Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) are required to be
performed at the local level nodes. Therefore, it is not suited
for low-cost sensors.
Simon and coworkers designed and implemented a
sniper localization system based on acoustic signal proces-
sing and triangulation in [6]. Special hardware (Digital
Signal Processing board) was designed in [6] for the
resource-intensive acoustic signal processing tasks. In [7],
He et al. designed and implemented a WSN with magnetic,
acoustic, and motion sensors, which could classify a moving
target such as a walking person or a vehicle. The motion
sensor used in this work is a micropower impulse radar.
Due to their high cost (typically US$5K), they may not be a
suitable choice for many WSN systems.
Coates and Ing also made use of the PF for target
tracking in [8]. However, they propose to model each mote
as a particle. Consequently, the corresponding real-world
deployment would require thousands of motes to achieve
tracking performance comparable to their simulation
results. Further, the authors assumed that the motes have
a fixed sensing range of 8 meters, a fixed detection
probability of 0.7 within this sensing range and also
assumed absence of any communication errors. All these
assumptions make it difficult to apply the proposed
algorithm in a real-world system.
Recent examples of tracking work using off-the-shelf
WSN devices include [9], [10], and [11]. All of these
solutions require the presence of a cooperative target to
generate specific sequence of signals, i.e., RF and audio [9]
or target equipped with inertial sensors [11]. Our technique
is based on sampling acoustic signals only thus the system
can be trained to track the movement of any target (e.g.,
vehicles) that generates acoustic signals in real life.
1334 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 9, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2010

Distributed implementation of PF and resampling algo- The design of the filter has been limited to estimating the
rithms has also been proposed in [12]. However, the focus state of a single target for the purposes of this work.
was on distributed computing, and the communication We now give a step by step overview of the operation of
overhead of the proposed approach is unreasonable for the PF and discuss how it is adapted to meet the require-
WSN applications. Similarly, work presented in [13] is based ments of our system.
on linear dynamics and observations. Unfortunately, most of
3.1 Target Model
the target tracking applications are highly nonlinear systems.
In the literature, most of the performance analysis on We begin by assuming that N sensors are deployed in an
collaborative signal processing is conducted by simulations n  m surveillance area, with known positions ðxi ; yi Þ,
and theoretical analysis, concentrating on exploring the i 2 f1 . . . Ng. We assume that the sensors are equipped with
design space and trade-offs under specific constraints and microphones. The sensors periodically sample the ambient
assumptions. The constraints and assumptions typically noise and transmit the readings to a central base station.
simplify the complicated real-world environments, which Suppose that a target is moving in this area according to
make it difficult to observe identical results, when the a known dynamic model:
corresponding algorithms are implemented in real-world
Xtþ1 ¼ F Xt þ vt ; ð1Þ
systems. What is lacking is a comprehensive study of the
PF, based on realistic assumptions, which explains what where
parameters have the most significant effect on the PF
behavior and can be used as a guideline for its implementa- . vt is the process noise, normally assumed to be
tion. In this work, we have carried out a detailed evaluation Gaussian noise with covariance matrix Q.
of the effect on various system parameters on the . t is time index.
performance of the PF in a realistic simulation environment. . Xt is the target state vector defined as
In addition, experiences with a real-world implementation
Xt ¼ ½xt ; x_t ; yt ; y_t ; It T ; ð2Þ
of the PF are also included. To the best of our knowledge,
both aforementioned contributions are the first of their kind where (xt ; yt ) and (x_t ; y_t ) denote the position and the
in the sensor network research community. velocity of the target and It denotes the target’s
acoustic intensity.
3 OVERVIEW OF THE PARTICLE FILTER The existence of the target in the data is modeled as a
binary Markov process. The target existence variable, Et ,
In this section, we provide a brief description of the particle
can take on two values, namely Et ¼ 0 indicating the
filter algorithm used in our work. Among the several
variants of the PF that are available, we use a recursive absence of the target and Et ¼ 1 denoting its presence. The
Bayesian tracking algorithm referred to as the Track-Before- target can appear at any place and at any time step.
Detect Particle Filter (TBD-PF) in [1], [14]. Using this type of Following its appearance, the target proceeds on a trajectory
filter allows the information in the measurements from all until it disappears, i.e., the intensity of the target signal
sensors to be incorporated exactly into the estimation of the strength falls below the sensors’ sensitivity level. We can
target state. The PF is a suboptimal nonlinear filter that model the transitional probabilities of the target birth, Pb ,
performs estimation using sequential Monte Carlo methods and its death, Pd , as follows:
to represent the probability density function of the target
Pb ¼ PrfEt ¼ 1jEt1 ¼ 0g; ð3Þ
state. Note that another popular choice for tracking, the
Kalman Filter (KF), assumes that system and the measure- Pd ¼ PrfEt ¼ 0jEt1 ¼ 1g: ð4Þ
ment processes are linear. However, in a variety of real
It is assumed that these probabilities are known a priori.
scenarios, the assumptions of KF do not hold and
However, if they are not known a very low value is
approximate techniques must be employed. The Extended
assumed (e.g., 0.01).
KF (EKF) approximates the models used for the measure-
The motion matrix, F , in (1) for a sampling interval of T
ment process to approximate the probability density by a
is given by
Gaussian. There are several advantages in using a PF-based
2 3
estimator over other nonlinear filtering approaches such as 1 T 0 0 0
the EKF. These include: 60 1 0 0 07
6 7
F ¼66 0 0 1 T 0 7:
7 ð5Þ
. Target presence and absence are explicitly modeled 40 0 0 1 05
by the probability function.
0 0 0 0 1
. The method can track targets moving randomly in
the field of deployment. The covariance matrix Q of vt is given by
. Non-Gaussian noise in sensor readings can be 2 T 3 q1 3
T 2 q1
incorporated into the filter by estimating the 3 2 0 0 0
distribution function of this noise. This incorporates 6 T 2 q1 7
6 2 T q1 0 0 0 7
the noise due to calibration errors in sensors in 6 T 3 q1 T 2 q1
7
Q¼6 0 0 0 7 ; ð6Þ
addition to the environmental noise. 6 3 2 7
4 T 2 q1 5
. It permits us to detect targets with variable levels 0 0 2 T q1 0
of intensity. 0 0 0 0 T q2

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AHMED ET AL.: DETECTION AND TRACKING USING PARTICLE-FILTER-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS 1335

where q1 and q2 control the uncertainty of the target the target dynamics (1) and the weights are calculated using
trajectory in position and intensity, respectively. the likelihood function arising from the measurement
equation (11) assuming that the target is present
3.2 Sensor Model
Each sensor i 2 f1 . . . Ng provides an acoustic measurement ðpÞ
Y
N
wt / N fZt ; hi ðXt Þ; Ri ðXt Þg; ð13Þ
at discrete instants of time, t. This measurement is made by
i¼1
calculating the variance (the mean acoustic power) of 1,000
acoustic samples taken at a constant sampling rate. It is where N fx; ; 2 g is the multivariate Gaussian function
assumed that each of these samples is approximately with mean  and variance 2 evaluated at x.
Gaussian distributed, with zero mean and variance given by Since, the target motion model is linear in the target state
and the measurement model does not depend on the
2i þ i It d
t;i : ð7Þ velocities a technique known as Rao-Blackwellization [1] or
marginalization [15] can be used to update the velocities of
The first term of (7), 2i , is the measurement noise variance each particle. In this case, each particle uses a standard
for sensor i, which represents both internal sensor noise and Kalman filter to update the velocities exactly, given the
constant background noise. The second term represents the positions, rather than rely on Monte Carlo methods to explore
part of the measured signal due to the target. The target is the velocity space. The method is one of a family of variance
assumed to be emitting a white acoustic signal of constant reduction techniques, which aim to reduce the variance of the
power, It , i is the gain factor for sensor i, and  is the path particle weights resulting in a more efficient filter.
loss, assumed identical for each sensor. The distance dt;i At each time step, the particle filter implemented here
from the target to sensor i at time t is given by forms two sets of particles. One set of particles carries
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi information about the target from the previous time step
dt;i ¼ ðxi  xt Þ2 þ ðyi  yt Þ2 : ð8Þ (called the target particles), while the other set searches
for a new target in the data (called the birth particles).
It can be easily shown that the measurement calculated The probability of the target existing in the data, Pte ¼
from the variance of the 1,000 Gaussian samples is 2 - PrfEt ¼ 1g, can be calculated as a function of the weights
distributed with 1,000 degrees of freedom. This distribution of these two sets of particles [16].
can be quite accurately approximated by a Gaussian with The resulting particle filter algorithm follows:
mean and variance
1. Particle proposal (birth): A set of PB particles,
ðB;pÞ B
hi ðXt Þ ¼ 2i
þ i It d ð9Þ fXt gPp¼1 , is generated assuming that there is no
t;i ;
target in the data. In this case, we randomly place
2  2 2
Ri ðXt Þ ¼ c i þ i It d
t;i ; ð10Þ samples around the coverage region.
Ns
2. Particle proposal (target): A set of PT particles,
ðT ;pÞ T
where c is a constant used to model nonlinearities in the fXt gPp¼1 is proposed from the particles at the
system and Ns ¼ 1;000 is the number of samples in the ðpÞ
previous time, Xt1 , sampling from (1) in combination
measurement. Section 4.1 discusses the method of calibra- with the Rao-Blackwellized velocities.
tion used to determine 2i and i for each sensor. 3. Weight calculation: Once we have placed all the
The sensor model can, thus, be summarized as particles we need to compute their associated weights
 using (13) and the measurement from the current
hi ðXt Þ þ wi ðXt Þ; if Et ¼ 1;
zt;i ¼ ð11Þ time, Zt
wi ; otherwise;
Y
N   ðS;pÞ   ðS;pÞ 
where wi ðXt Þ is Gaussian distributed with zero mean and ~t
w
ðS;pÞ
¼ N Zt ; hi Xt ; Ri Xt ; ð14Þ
variance Ri ðXt Þ and wi is Gaussian distributed with zero i¼1
mean and variance N2s c4i . The complete measurement
and then normalize
recorded at time t is denoted as Zt ¼ fzt;i : i ¼ 1 . . . Ng,
and the set of all measurements up to time t is denoted ðS;pÞ X
PS
ðS;pÞ ~t
w ðSÞ ðS;iÞ
Z1:t ¼ fZk : k ¼ 1 . . . tg. wt ¼ ðSÞ
; where Wt ¼ ~t
w ; ð15Þ
Wt i¼1
3.3 Estimation Algorithm
where S can refer to either B or T .
The basic function of the particle filter is to approximate the
4. Probability of existence: The probability of a target
posterior density of the target state, given all measure-
ðpÞ existing in the data can be calculated using the sum
ments, by a set of P points, Xt , called particles, and of the weights of the birth and target particles [16]
ðpÞ
corresponding weights, w [1]. That is,

X
P Pte  ; ð16Þ
ðpÞ  ðpÞ 
e e
 þ Pd Pt1 þ ð1  Pb Þð1  Pt1 Þ
pðXt jZ1:t Þ  wt  Xt  Xt ; ð12Þ
ðT Þ e ðBÞ  e

p¼1  ¼ Wt ð1  Pd ÞPt1 þ Wt Pb 1  Pt1 : ð17Þ
where ðÞ is the Dirac delta function. The particles and their
weights are updated recursively as new measurements 5. Combining: The birth and target particles are then
become available. At each time step, the particle positions combined into one set of PB þ PT particles with
are proposed from their previous position by sampling from weights

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1336
ðB;pÞ  e
 ðBÞ ðB;pÞ
wt ¼ Pb 1  Pt1 Wt wt ;
  e
ðT ;pÞ ðT Þ ðT ;pÞ
wt ¼ 1  Pd Pt1 Wt wt ;
followed by another normalization.
6. Resampling: The last step in the PF is the resampling
process. Resampling eliminates particles with
weights that are of low importance and multiplies
those with higher values. The resampling also
reduces the set of PB þ PT particles down to PT ,
ðpÞ T
resulting in the set of particles fXt gPp¼1 all with
uniform weights. We use the systematic resampling
procedure described in [1].
7. If Pe is above a predetermined threshold then a
target is declared present, where the particles
resulting from Step No. 6 describe the target state.
An estimate of the target position can be calculated
from the set of particles by taking their mean
XPT
^t  1
X
ðpÞ
X :
PT p¼1 t
8. For the next time step, we collect a new set of
readings Ztþ1 and go back to Step 1.
4 SIMULATION RESULTS
As discussed earlier, one of the goals of this study is to
determine the effect of various parameters on the perfor-
mance of the tracking system. A secondary goal is to
provide recommendations on the choice of these design
parameters to engineer a real WSN-based tracking solution.
The simulations described in this document have been
conducted using the NS2 discrete event simulator using
realistic values of transmission and sensing ranges resulting
in a multihop communication network. Preliminary simula-
tion results appeared in a previous publication [17].
For our simulation studies, we assume that N sensors are
statically deployed in an area of size 120 m  120 m. We
studied two popular and commonly used deployment
topologies: 1) Grid: where the nodes are placed at an equal
distance from each other resembling a perfect grid shape
and 2) Uniform Random (UR): where the nodes are
uniformly distributed over the entire field of deployment.
However, to avoid large areas without sensor coverage, in
the latter case, we divided the area into a number of smaller
cells of equal size (the number of equal sized cells depends
on the total number of nodes that are being deployed) and
then randomly placed a node in each of the resulting cells.
We assume that each node is equipped with an acoustic
sensor and that it samples the ambient sound at predefined
intervals. We refer to these intervals as sampling intervals/
time steps in the rest of this paper.
As the NS2 simulator lacks acoustic sensor model, we
have modeled the acoustic samples measured by the sensors
as a simple distance-based function, wherein the intensity of
these readings is an inverse function of the euclidean
distance between the current position of the target and the
location of the sensors. The acoustic measurements recorded
by the sensors are, therefore, not actual readings but rather
synthetically generated based on the calibration results.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 9, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2010
ð18Þ
TABLE 1
ð19Þ Simulation Parameters
For simplicity, we limit this work to estimation of a single
target moving along a straight diagonal line from a point at
the bottom left corner of the topology to the right hand top
corner. The velocity of the target was set to 0.35 m/sec and
each simulation was run for 450 seconds. The base station is
located at the center of the topology (at location 60,60). The
complete simulation consists of two parts. The first part is
performed in NS2 where all the measurements during the
ð20Þ simulation run are recorded by each node and then these
measurements are forwarded to the centrally located base
station, over multihop, where they act as inputs to the PF. The
PF assumes the values q1 ¼ 0:002 and q2 ¼ 106 , in reference
to (6), and low values for the birth and death probabilities,
Pb ¼ Pd ¼ 0:01, in this case. Once all the data are available,
the base station runs the PF code (offline, in MATLAB). The
NS2 simulation parameters are listed in Table 1. For MAC,
we used 802.11 with RTS and CTS turned off.
To quantitatively measure the performance of the
tracking system, we define a metric, accuracy of estimation
as the average euclidean distance between the actual and
estimated location of the target. This metric is computed at
each step of the execution of the PF. The second metric used
in our evaluation is the computation time required for
executing the PF algorithm. The total computation time is
Tcomp ¼ Tns þ Tpf where Tns is time (real time) taken in Ns2
to collect all the measurements at the base station for a
particular run of simulation and Tpf denotes the time taken
by MATLAB to run the PF at the base station.
For each run of the simulation, the measurements were
taken for each node at the sampling interval T . For each
time step, when the PF detects the presence of the target, the
error is calculated in terms of the euclidean distance
between the estimated location as indicated by the PF and
the actual target location. For each run of the simulation, we
calculated the quadratic mean (Root Mean Square,
sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
PN 2
i¼1 erri
RMS ¼ ;
N
where N is the total number of samples) of these errors
across all the sampling intervals. We repeated each of our
simulations 100 times and the results are shown as an
average of all RMS error values. We also calculate the
standard deviation in RMS values for 100 runs of the
simulations. A similar process is repeated for the second
metric, the computation time.
4.1 Calibration
Calibration of the nodes is an important aspect of a realistic
target tracking system [18]. Recall that our system uses the
acoustic samples recorded by the sensor microphones as the
AHMED ET AL.: DETECTION AND TRACKING USING PARTICLE-FILTER-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS 1337

TABLE 2 TABLE 3
Summary of the Parameters Estimated for Each Sensor Summary of c Estimated for Each Sensor for Different Distances

input signal to the PF. In this section, we present a simple

yet effective mechanism for calibrating the sensor micro-
phones. We assume that a white noise source of unit
(arbitrary) intensity is available, which can be placed at
varying distances from the sensor to be calibrated. We have
chosen a white noise source over a tone, since our targets of
interest such as vehicles typically have a broadband
acoustic signature. Further, a white noise source is more
robust to environmental effects such as multipath reflec-
tions in an indoor environment.
Referring to the mean of the measurement function (9),
repeated here, dropping the time index for brevity
zi ¼ 2i þ i Id
i ;
the mean (21) and variance (10), of the measurement
function involve four calibration parameters, namely the
gain i , the noise variance 2i , the path loss factor , and the
Maximum likelihood offers an alternative method for
determining all of the parameters 2 , , and c, and in addition
allows the calculation of . A set of samples is taken at varying
distances from a source of known amplitude such that ,
which controls the decay of amplitude with distance in the
measurement function, can be inferred, along with the other
parameters if desired. Denoting sample m 2 f1 . . . Mg at
distance d 2 D ¼ fd1 . . . dk g by zmd , the mean and variance of
zmd are given by (9) and (10), respectively. The likelihood of all
measurements z ¼ fzmd jm 2 f1 . . . Mg; d 2 Dg conditioned
on the parameters ¼ f; ; 2 ; cg can then be written as
ð21Þ
YY
M
pðzj Þ ¼ pðzmd j Þ ð26Þ
d2D m¼1
YY
M 

2   2
constant c used to model nonlinearities in the system. In ¼ N zmd ; d þ 2 ; c d þ 2 : ð27Þ
Ns
order to accurately track a target, the gain, i , and the noise d2D m¼1

variance, 2i , must be determined for each sensor i, while it The maximum likelihood solution for the parameters is
is assumed that the path loss factor, , and the nonlinearity calculated using
constant, c, are the same for each sensor. We assume that
the resulting parameters are independent of the sensor ^ ¼ arg max log pðzj Þ ð28Þ

orientation, which may or may not be valid, depending on
the sensor and the sensing environment. XX
M  
¼ arg min logðcÞ þ 2 log d þ 2
From (21), if there is no signal from the source (I ¼ 0 or
d2D m¼1
di ! 1) then each measurement is solely from the noise,  2
Ns zmd
which encapsulates background noise and internal mea- þ 1 : ð29Þ
2c d þ 2
surement noise. Thus, taking the mean of M0 measurements
ð0;mÞ
zi from sensor i gives an estimate of 2i This is a nonlinear minimization problem which requires a
numerical method to solve. Since 2 , , and c can be
1 XM0
ð0;mÞ determined using the simple procedures outlined above,
^2i ¼ z : ð22Þ
M0 m¼1 i the minimization in (29) is simply over .
Results of applying this calibration procedure for five
Similarly, if the source of unit acoustic power is placed at different sensors gives the estimated parameters 2 , , and 
exactly unit distance from the sensor, then (21) reduces to summarized in Table 2 and the parameter c summarized in
ð1Þ Table 3 for each distance. From the estimates presented in
zi ¼ 2i þ i ; ð23Þ the tables appropriate values of the constants  and c,
and so if M1 measurements are taken, then the sample mean chosen to be independent of each mote, are
gives an estimate of i
  2:2; ð30Þ
1 X
M1
ð1;mÞ
c  1:5: ð31Þ
^2i þ ^i ¼ z : ð24Þ
M1 m¼1 i
4.2 Comparison of PF with a Simple
Using (10) an estimate of c is possible by using the mean, Triangulation-Based Tracking System
^ 2i , of a set of samples from a source of any
z^i , and variance,  We first evaluate the performance of the PF-based tracking
acoustic power. This gives comparing it with a simple triangulation-based tracking
system [2] for different number of nodes. For triangulation,
^2
Ns 
c^ ¼ : ð25Þ we assumed that the distance estimates by measuring
z2
2^ propagation delays are within þ=  5 percent of the actual

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1338
Fig. 1. Comparison of PF and triangulation-based tracking.
values. Simulation results for PF are obtained by using
5,000 particles and sampling interval of 1 sec. Fig. 1 shows
RMS tracking error in the target’s location (with error bars
representing the standard deviations). Note that there are
no error bars for grid deployment for triangulation-based
tracking. This is because the triangulation-based tracking
always produces the same magnitude of error for a given
grid topology (nonprobabilistic estimation). We used five
different uniform random topologies and ran the simula-
tion 100 times to calculate the standard deviations in the
RMS values for both PF and triangulation.
Fig. 1 shows that PF performs better than triangulation-
based tracking for both grid and uniform random deploy-
ments. There are two main reasons for the poor performance
by triangulation-based tracking. Firstly, the inaccuracies in
distance estimates (taken as a random value between
þ=  5 percent for this simulation) affect the triangulation-
based localization and secondly for sparse topologies, the
triangulation algorithm introduces errors when distance
estimates are reported by less than three motes required for
triangulation. The results show that PF performs much
better than triangulation for sparse topologies and that
difference between the performance of the two decreases for
very dense topologies, e.g., 100 nodes in 120 m  120 m area.
4.3 Design Parameters
We next evaluate the effect of various design parameters on
the detection accuracy and computation time of the particle-
filter-based tracking system.
4.3.1 Effect of the Number of Deployed Sensor Nodes
Figs. 1a and 1b shows that for grid deployment, the RMS
tracking error drops from about 7.14 meters for 16 nodes to
Fig. 2. Effect of the number of nodes on the computation time.
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2.53 meters for 49 nodes. For UR deployment, the
corresponding value decreases from 6.96 to 3.11 meters.
Grid deployment shows overall better performance than the
UR deployment. Note that tracking performance for UR
with 81 nodes is worse than that with 64 nodes. This can be
attributed to the random nature of the UR deployment
strategy. The UR deployment thus performs better or worse
than the grid deployment depending on the node place-
ment with respect to the target trajectory.
Fig. 2 shows the computation time of the PF versus the
number of deployed nodes. We can see that the computation
time of the PF grows almost linearly with the number of
deployed nodes for both grid and uniform random deploy-
ment. Packet loss also increases sharply with increase in
number of nodes beyond 49 as shown in Fig. 3. This suggests,
that for the given size of the deployment field, target and
sensor node characteristics (intensity, sensitivity, etc.), and
the selected networking and simulation parameters, the
optimal density for the deployment of sensor nodes should
be somewhere around 34 nodes per 100 m2 , which corre-
sponds to 49 nodes for the target area under investigation.
This node density gives a balance between the error in
estimation (RMS tracking error of about 2.5-3 m) and total
computation time (about 230 seconds).
4.3.2 Effect of the Number of Generated Particles
Next, we examine the effect of the number of generated
particles on the performance of the tracking system. Recall
that in our system, a number of particles are randomly
generated near the sensor nodes. Further, the number of
particles are independent of the number of deployed nodes
(see Section 3) and only the Tpf component of the total
computation time varies with change in number of particles.
Fig. 3. Effect of the number of nodes on packet loss.
AHMED ET AL.: DETECTION AND TRACKING USING PARTICLE-FILTER-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Fig. 4. Effect of the number of generated particles on the estimation error.
Fig. 4 shows the results of the simulation for different
number of generated particles for both grid and UR
deployments. The number of nodes is 49 and the sampling
interval is 1 sec. In Fig. 4a, the RMS error in estimation for
grid deployment reduces from about 4.28 to 2.37 meters
when the number of particles are increased from 1,000 to
6,000. After that the error begins to decrease at a much slower
rate. For UR deployment (Fig. 4b), the RMS tracking error
reduces from 4.57 meters with 1,000 particles to 3.03 meters
at 6,000 particles. However, from Fig. 5, we can see that for
both grid and UR deployments the computation time of the
PF grows linearly with the number of generated particles.
Computation time for both grid and UR deployment is
between 230 to 270 secs for 5,000-6,000 generated particles.
This suggests that given the simulation parameters, 5,000-
6,000 particles is a good trade-off between detection accuracy
and computation time.
4.3.3 Effect of the Sampling Interval
Fig. 6 shows the effect of the variation in sampling interval
on the PF’s behavior. The number of nodes is set as 49 with
5,000 particles. Intuitively, the larger the sampling interval,
the longer the nodes will remain idle, hence the less energy
they will consume and the longer the region can be
surveilled. However, as can be seen from this figure, the
RMS error in estimation of the target’s location begins to
increase with the increase in the sampling interval. Best
tracking results are obtained with 0.5 to 1 sec sampling
interval for both grid and UR deployment. The computation
time, on the other hand, reduces from about 500 to 230 sec as
the sampling interval is increased from 0.5 to 1 sec in Fig. 7.
This implies that given the node density and the selected
Fig. 5. Effect of the number of generated particles on the computation
time.
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1339
simulation parameters, 1 sec sampling time is an appropriate
choice for this case.
4.4 Effect of Calibration Parameters
In Section 4.1, we have identified four calibration para-
meters that need to be determined for accurate tracking of a
target. In this section, we evaluate the effect of variations in
estimation of these calibration parameters on the perfor-
mance of the particle-filter-based tracking system. For this
set of simulations, we consider 49 nodes, 5,000 particles,
and a sampling interval of 1 sec as recommended in the
previous section. Also note that since changing the
calibration parameters has no effect on the computation
time, the results reported in this section does not include the
computation time metric.
4.4.1 Effect of the Path Loss Factor of Target’s
Intensity ()
Fig. 8 shows the RMS tracking error for different values of
the path loss factor used in the PF for the target intensity.
For this set of simulations, the synthetically produced target
intensity values are based on path loss factor of 2.2 (30)
while the path loss value supplied to the particle filter is
varied from 1.6 to 3. The figure shows that if the value of the
path loss factor (i.e., estimated through calibration) sup-
plied to the PF does not correspond to the real value, RMS
tracking error values increases sharply with the increase in
the mismatch in value. Note that underestimation of the
path loss factor (e.g., 1.6 instead of 2.2) results in higher
error than its overestimation.
4.4.2 Effect of the Nonlinearity Constant (c)
Fig. 9 shows the RMS tracking error for different values of
the nonlinearity constant c used in the PF for the target
intensity. The nonlinearity constant is varied from 1 to 2
while the synthetically produced target intensity values are
based on the value of c as 1.5 (31). The figure shows that the
mismatch between estimated and the real value of c has
minimal effect on the tracking error for grid deployment.
For UR deployment, the increase in error is also not steep
with maximum observed tracking error of around 5 m.
4.4.3 Effect of the Gain Values ()
As described in Section 4.1, each sensor is calibrated to
determine its individual gain values. For the synthetically
produced target intensity values in simulations, random
values of gain are assigned to each sensor (from a range of
1340
Fig. 6. Effect of sampling interval on the estimation error.
valid values determined from calibration). In order to study
the impact of variance in the gain values, we vary these
values between þ=30 percent.
Fig. 10 shows the RMS tracking error for different values
of the gain () used in the PF for the target intensity. The
RMS error values for both grid and UR deployment increase
with increase/decrease in the gain values. Again the
increase is not as high as observed for estimation of path
loss (Section 4.4.1).
4.4.4 Effect of the Noise Variance Values (2 )
Similar to the gain values, each sensor is calibrated to
determine its individual noise variance values (2 ). In order
to study the effect of estimation of noise variance, we
increased/decreased the randomly assigned noise variance
values (selected from a valid range determined through
actual calibration) for all the sensors from 5 to 20 percent.
Fig. 11 shows that if the value of the noise variation
(estimated through calibration) supplied to the PF does not
correspond to the real value, RMS tracking error values
increases sharply with the increase in the mismatch. Note
that RMS error increases more when lower noise variance
is estimated than the actual values as compared to the case
when higher noise variance is estimated than the actual
values. This is to be expected, as a conservative value for
the measurement noise is less restrictive on the estimation
process, whereas as an under-approximation of the
measurement noise forces the estimation process to
account for measurement errors in the estimate of the
state. The RMS error for grid deployment increased from
2.53 to about 9 for a 10 percent decrease in the estimated
values while the RMS error values become too high ð>20Þ
Fig. 7. Effect of sampling interval on the computation time.
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for any further decrease after 10 percent. Increase in RMS
tracking error is, once again, more for UR deployment as
compared to grid deployment.
The simulation results from Section 4.4 show that out of
the four calibration parameters evaluated, estimation of
noise variation values (2 ) has the most effect on the detection
accuracy of the particle-filter-based tracking system. The
tracking system can only tolerate about 10 percent lower
estimated noise variance values. If the actual noise variance is
more than 10 percent, the PF starts giving large tracking
errors. The effect of estimation of noise variations is followed
by the effect of path loss factor of target’s intensity () while
estimation of gain () and nonlinearity constant (c) has
relatively less effect on the performance of the tracking
system. This highlights the need for an accurate calibration
mechanism to estimate the critical values of noise variance
and the path loss factor.
5 THEORETICAL ANALYSIS AND COMPARISON
In this section, we first derive the Cramér-Rao Bound for
the scenario used in our simulations. We next compare
this theoretical lower bound with the results from our
simulations.
5.1 The Posterior Cramér-Rao Bound (PCRB)
The Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) is a theoretical construct,
which specifies a lower bound on the second-order
estimation error performance of any unbiased estimator
[5]. We compute this theoretical bound for the scenario used
in the simulations of Section 4.
The state evolution model and the measurement model
are as described in Section 3. For simplicity, we will limit
our analysis to the single target case, although the multi-
target CRB directly follows [19]. As in the case of the
simulation scenario, a WSN composed of N ¼ 49 acoustic
sensor nodes is deployed in a two-dimensional region of
size 120 m  120 m.
An unbiased estimate of the state vector Xt , based on Z1:t
and the known distribution of the initial target state, pðX0 Þ,
is denoted by X ^ t , and its error covariance matrix by Pt . The
lower bound of Pt , referred to as the posterior Cramér-Rao
bound is expressed as follows [5]:
n o
: ^ t  Xt ÞðX ^ t  Xt ÞT jz1:t ; pðX0 Þ  J 1 :
Pt ¼ E ð X t ð32Þ
AHMED ET AL.: DETECTION AND TRACKING USING PARTICLE-FILTER-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS 1341

Fig. 8. Effect of path loss factor on the estimation error.

Fig. 9. Effect of nonlinearity constant on the estimation error.

Fig. 10. Effect of gain on the estimation error.

Fig. 11. Effect of noise variance on the estimation error.

The inequality in (32) implies that the difference Pt  Jt1 is where

a positive semidefinite matrix. Matrix Jt in (32) is referred to  T
as the information matrix and its inverse is the PCRB. @ @
r ¼ ;...; ; ð34Þ
For a nonlinear filtering problem specified by (1) and @1 @r
(11), the information matrix can be computed recursively as  T
 ¼ r r ; ð35Þ
follows [1]:
and the likelihood function, pðZtþ1 jXtþ1 Þ, is defined by (9)
 tþ1 and (10). For the purposes of calculating the bound it is
Jtþ1 ¼ ½F 1 T Jt F 1  E X
Xtþ1 log pðZtþ1 jXtþ1 Þ ; ð33Þ
assumed that the process noise, Q, is zero, that is the target

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1342 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, VOL. 9, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2010

Fig. 13. Experimental setup.

Fig. 12. Comparison of CRB and simulation results.
trajectory is deterministic. For the measurement model
specified in Section 3.2, the expectation in (33) can be
evaluated as
expect some mismatch between the filter performance and
the bound due to the fact that the bound is a theoretically
ideal quantity.

 tþ1 XN 6 EXPERIMENTS
 E X
Xtþ1 log pðZtþ1 jXtþ1 Þ ¼
T
Htþ1;i R1
tþ1;i Htþ1;i ; ð36Þ
i¼1
In order to validate the simulations results described in
Section 4 and to test the performance of the PF-based
where Ht;i is the Jacobian of hi ðXt Þ evaluated at the true tracking system in a real-world environment, we have
value of Xt conducted initial experiments. In this section, we present
2 3 our findings obtained from these indoor experiments. Fig. 13
ðxi  xt Þi It d2 t;i shows the setup of our test bed. We used a prototype test bed
6 0 7
6 7 consisting of Xbow MicaZ motes. These motes were
Ht;i ¼ 6
6 ðy i  y t Þ i I t d2 7
7; ð37Þ
4
t;i
5 programmed to perform high frequency sampling to
0 measure the acoustic signals (at 5 kHz) generated by the
i d
t;i target (a remote controlled toy car). We used three different
and R1 topologies where 8, 10, and 14 of these MicaZ motes were
t;i is given by
deployed in an area of size 2:0 meters  3:5 meters (Fig. 13)
4c þ Ns with different internode spacing. A mote attached with a
R1
t;i ¼  2 2 ; ð38Þ
2c i þ i It d
t;i
laptop was used as the data sink. The motes measure the
acoustic signals and send a summary of the acoustic samples
once again evaluated at the true value of Xt . The terms in to the laptop (single hop communication), which executes
(37) and (38) are as defined in Section 3. the PF. The speed of the target was varied from 0.2 to 0.35 m/
sec in different set of experiments.
5.2 Comparison of PCRB and Simulation Results Time synchronization among the motes was achieved
For the PCRB calculations, the initial state vector was by a Beeper mote broadcasting a beacon message every
chosen as 0.5 seconds (sampling interval). On receiving a beacon,
each mote starts sampling to collect 1,000 discrete samples
X0 ¼ ½15 0:25 5 0:25 0:7T ; ð39Þ (taking 0.2 s at 5 kHz). To reduce the storage requirements
where the first and the third components are in meters, while at the motes, radio communications, and the size of the
the second and the fourth components are in meters/sec. For data packets, motes only maintain summary statistics
the purposes of this work, the initial J0 was approximated as (sum and sum of squares) instead of the raw values.
a diagonal matrix with These summary statistics were then transferred during the
next 0.3 seconds over the wireless link to the base station.
J01 ¼ P0 ¼ diagð½0:1 0:05 0:1 0:05 0:012 Þ: ð40Þ Note that the sample variance can be easily calculated at
the base station as we know the total number of samples,
The displayed error bounds are computed as follows: sum, and sum of squares of the samples, as shown
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi !2
bt ¼ Jt1 ½1; 1 þ Jt1 ½3; 3; ð41Þ 1X Ns
2 1X Ns
varðXÞ ¼ ðXi Þ  Xi : ð42Þ
N i¼1 N i¼1
where Jt1 ½1; 1 and Jt1 ½3; 3 are the diagonal elements of the
inverse of the information matrix corresponding to the x To ensure that all data packets are received at the base
and y coordinates, respectively. station, we incorporated an application level TDMA scheme
Next, we compare the theoretical lower error bounds to allocate discrete contention-free time slots to each mote
with the RMS errors of the simulated PF. The number of for data transfer to the base station (discussed in detail in
particles used was 5,000 and the PF was run 500 times for Section 7). The base station executes the PF with 5,000
the bound comparison. Fig. 12 illustrates that the simulated particles. Prior to running the experiments, the environ-
PF follows the general trend of the theoretical bound. We mental path loss factor and nonlinearity constant are

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AHMED ET AL.: DETECTION AND TRACKING USING PARTICLE-FILTER-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Fig. 14. Tracking results (arrows represent actual paths).
estimated through calibration experiments. Moreover, gain
and noise variation are also estimated by calibrating each
mote carefully in the same experimental environment, as
described in Section 4.1.
Some of the tracking results are shown in Fig. 14 where
actual paths are shown by pointed arrows. Fig. 15 shows the
quantitative performance (mean and standard deviation of
tracking error) of the WSN-based tracking system for two
different velocities of the target. Results show that mean
tracking error is less for cases when more motes are
deployed and when speed of the target is slower. Best
tracking results (mean error of 0.11 m) is obtained for 14
motes in the topology with speed of target at 0.2 m/s. Note
that the reported errors are approximate in that they have
been calculated at discrete points along the path due to
variability in speed of the target. The PF implemented in
Matlab (running on a 1.6 GHz laptop with 1 GB of RAM)
takes on average about 200 ms to estimate the next target
position for one iteration of measurements. This shows that
the PF can be implemented in an online tracking system to
give close to real-time tracking results.
The results demonstrate that the PF-based estimator
performs very well in tracking of the target using real data
collected by off-the-shelf WSN devices.
7 SYSTEM DESIGN CHALLENGES
In this section, we discuss various system design challenges
faced during the experimental study. We also describe the
steps taken to overcome these challenges. We believe that
these contributions are particularly important for real-
world field deployment of WSN systems.
7.1 Calibration
Our empirical experiments have shown that estimation of
correct calibration parameters have a significant effect on
the performance of the PF-based estimator. Initially, we
started with a simple calibration mechanism where sensors
were placed at known distances from a target acoustic
signal (e.g., a 4 kHz tone emitted by a sounder of MicaZ
acoustic sensor board) of known intensity. These sensors
are then characterized in term of mean and variance of
received total acoustic power as a function of the distance.
The same set of calibration experiments is then repeated
with no sound source to estimate the background noise.
These intensity and background noise values are then fed
into the PF for estimation. The results obtained by applying
this calibration procedure to the tracking system indicated
that the calibration mechanism need to be modified for
improving the performance.
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1343
Fig. 15. Quantitative tracking results.
An improved version of the calibration process was later
adopted where calibration is done with a white noise source
of known signal power (Section 4.1). The improved
calibration process is simpler and has shown better results
than its predecessor process.
7.2 Reliability Issues
Packet losses are expected to occur in a real multihop
network deployment. These losses can be due to channel
contention, collisions, and queues overflows in buffers.
To determine the maximum packet transmission rate in
order to avoid the buffer overflows, a source mote was
initially programmed to send 34 bytes packets to a mote
base station running the standard TinyOS TOSBase applica-
tion. The packet transmission rate was progressively
increased until the base station started dropping packets
at its radio/UART queues. The base station was able to
receive all of the packets (about 128 packets/sec) with
interpacket transmission delay of 8 ms. This gives us a
bound on the maximum transmission rate attainable with
the default setup.
To avoid the packet losses due to contention and
collisions, we incorporated an application level TDMA in
our implementation with the time slot defined as 8 ms
(for multiple senders-single receiver). Recall that motes
collect 1,000 samples in 0.2 sec (@5 kHz) and have the
next 0.3 seconds to transmit a 34 byte packet containing
the summary statistics of these 1,000 samples. With 8 ms
as the interpacket transmission delay to avoid the buffer
overflows, we can have 34 nodes in the collision domain
transmitting in TDMA time slots giving us 100 percent
successful packet transmission rate. Note that we have
used a simple application layer TDMA scheme instead of
using a MAC layer TDMA [20] in order to match the
application sampling rate with the TDMA interval.
7.3 Scalability Issues
In order to make the implementation scalable, we intro-
duced clustering based on multiple collision domains by
tuning motes to different transmission channels (16 avail-
able channels in Xbow 2.4 GHz MicaZ motes). These
clusters form the lower layer of a hierarchical topology. This
clustering introduces additional issues such as time
synchronization among different collision domain-based
clusters and data fusion among multiple base stations. For
time synchronization, we chose to synchronize the beeper
nodes with a hybrid time synchronization protocol that
1344
incorporates accurate byte level time stamping from Flood-
ing Time Synchronization Protocol (from Vanderbilt Uni-
versity) [21] in simple pairwise message exchanges of the
Time synchronization Protocol for Sensor Networks (TPSN)
protocol [22]. The time stamps are made at each byte
boundary after the SYNC bytes as they are transmitted or
received to counter the nondeterministic delays in radio
message delivery in WSN.
We have conducted further experiments with multiple
collision domains with 25 nodes [17] and 36 nodes grid
topologies (not reported in this paper due to space
limitations). All nodes were able to successfully transmit
their data packets to their respective base stations.
8 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
In this paper, we have presented a detailed evaluation of
the performance of a WSN tracking system, which employs
the PF algorithm. We developed a simple yet effective
mechanism for calibrating off-the-shelf sensor motes. We
observed the effect of various design and calibration
parameters such as number of deployed nodes, number of
generated particles, sampling interval, path loss factor,
noise variations, gain, and nonlinearity constant on the
estimation accuracy and computation time of the tracking
system. We also made recommendations on the optimal
values for these parameters, which achieve an acceptable
trade-off between accuracy and complexity. Moreover, we
identified that among the calibration parameters, estimation
of the noise variation values has the most significant effect
on the performance of the tracking system. It is pertinent to
mention here that the characteristics of the target such as its
volume and speed also effect the choice of these design
parameters. These recommendations on the choice of
design parameters can be utilized to engineer a real WSN-
based tracking solution. We also derived the theoretical
lower bound, the CRB, and demonstrated that the results
from our simulations are comparable to the bound.
We discuss the challenges experienced in implementing
a prototype of our system using off-the-shelf sensor nodes.
We describe custom algorithms that were implemented for
successfully realizing the system. We found that our
prototype comprising of off-the-shelf sensor nodes can
successfully track the moving target in several scenarios.
Our experimental results are quite promising and suggest
that low-cost sensor nodes can effectively complement
sophisticated target detection hardware.
In future, we plan to do a real-time implementation of
the PF-base tracking system and to test the implementation
in the outdoor environment.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper is a result of collaboration between UNSW
(School of Computer Science and Engineering) and DSTO
(ISR Division).
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AHMED ET AL.: DETECTION AND TRACKING USING PARTICLE-FILTER-BASED WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
Nadeem Ahmed received the BE degree from
the University of Engineering and Technology,
Lahore, Pakistan, and the MS and PhD degrees
in computer sciences from the University of New
South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia, in
2000 and 2007, respectively. He is currently a
research associate with the School of Computer
Science and Engineering at UNSW. His re-
search interests include wireless sensor net-
works and mobile ad hoc networks. He is a
member of the IEEE.
Mark Rutten received the BSc degree in
computer science and theoretical physics in
1994, the BE degree in electrical engineering
in 1995, and the MSc degree in signal and
information processing in 1998, all from The
University of Adelaide, and the PhD degree in
electrical and electronic engineering from the
University of Melbourne in 2005. Since 1996, he
has been working with the Defence Science and
Technology Organization in Edinburgh, Austra-
lia, working with the Tracking and Sensor Fusion group from 1999. His
research interests include nonlinear filtering, tracking, and track fusion.
Travis Bessell received the BE degree in
computer systems engineering from Flinders
University in 2005 and the MSc degree in signal
and information processing from The University
of Adelaide in 2008. Since 2005, he has been
working with the Defence Science and Technol-
ogy Organization, Edinburgh, Australia, working
with the Tracking and Sensor Fusion group. His
research interests include wireless sensor net-
works, nonlinear filtering, and tracking.
Salil S. Kanhere received the BE degree in
electrical engineering from the University of
Bombay, India, in 1998, and the MS and PhD
degrees in electrical engineering from Drexel
University, Philadelphia, in 2001 and 2003,
respectively. He is currently a senior lecturer
with the School of Computer Science and
Engineering at the University of New South
Wales, Sydney, Australia. His current research
interests include wireless sensor networks,
vehicular communication, mobile computing, and network security. He
is a member of the IEEE and the ACM.
Authorized licensed use limited to: ANNA UNIVERSITY. Downloaded on August 04,2010 at 19:24:19 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
1345
Neil Gordon received the BSc degree in
mathematics and physics from Nottingham
University, United Kingdom, in 1988, and the
PhD degree in statistics from Imperial College,
University of London, in 1993. From 1988 to
2002, he was with various research groups
within DERA and QinetiQ working in the areas of
missile guidance, target tracking, and statistical
data processing. Since August 2002, he has
been with DSTO in Australia where he is
currently the head of the Tracking and Sensor Fusion research group.
He is a coeditor/coauthor of two books on particle filtering. He is a
member of the IEEE.
Sanjay Jha received the PhD degree from the
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He
is a professor and head of the Network Group in
the School of Computer Science and Engineer-
ing at the University of New South Wales. His
research activities cover a wide range of topics
in networking including wireless sensor net-
works, ad hoc/community wireless networks,
resilience/quality of service (QoS) in IP net-
works, and active/programmable network. He
has published more than 100 articles in high quality journals and
conferences. He is the principal author of the book Engineering Internet
QoS and a coeditor of the book Wireless Sensor Networks: A Systems
Perspective. He is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on
Mobile Computing. He was a member-at-large for the Technical
Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) of the IEEE
Computer Society for a number of years. He has served on program
committees of several conferences. He was the technical program
committee chair of the IEEE Local Computer Networks LCN2004 and
ATNAC04 conferences, and the cochair or general chair of the Emnets-1
and Emnets-II workshops, respectively. He was also the general chair of
the ACM SenSys 2007 symposium. He is a senior member of the IEEE
and the IEEE Computer Society.
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