Distributed Active Sensor Scheduling for Target Tracking in Ultrasonic Sensor Networks

Active ultrasonic sensors for target tracking application may suffer from inter-sensor-interference if these highly dense deployed sensors are not scheduled, which can degrade the tracking performance. In this paper, we propose a dynamic distributed sensor scheduling (DSS) scheme, where the tasking sensor is elected spontaneously from the sensors with pending sensing tasks via random competition based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA). The channel will be released immediately when sensing task is completed. Both simulation results and testbed experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of DSS scheme for large scale sensor networks in terms of system scalability and high tracking performance.