Object Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks: Challenges and Solutions

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are small, inexpensive and battery-operated sensor nodes that are deployed over a geographical area. WSNs are used in many applications such border patrolling, military intrusion detection, wildlife animal monitoring, surveillance of natural disasters and healthcare systems. Mobile object tracking is a vital task in all these applications. The goal of this work is to highlight the most important challenges in the field of object tracking and provide a survey of the WSN architectural design and implementation approaches for tackling this problem. To that end, we analyze how each approach responds to each challenge and where it falls short. This analysis should provide researchers with a state-of-the-art review and inspire them to propose novel solutions.