This article is part of the series Algorithmic Aspects of Wireless Networks.

Open Access Research Article

Fault-Tolerant Target Localization in Sensor Networks

Min Ding1*, Fang Liu1, Andrew Thaeler1, Dechang Chen2 and Xiuzhen Cheng1

Author Affiliations

1 Computer Science Department, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA

2 Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD 20817, USA

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EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2007, 2007:096742 doi:10.1155/2007/96742


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/096742


Received:21 July 2006
Revisions received:8 November 2006
Accepted:13 November 2006
Published:9 January 2007

© 2007 Ding et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Fault-tolerant target detection and localization is a challenging task in collaborative sensor networks. This paper introduces our exploratory work toward identifying the targets in sensor networks with faulty sensors. We explore both spatial and temporal dimensions for data aggregation to decrease the false alarm rate and improve the target position accuracy. To filter out extreme measurements, the median of all readings in a close neighborhood of a sensor is used to approximate its local observation to the targets. The sensor whose observation is a local maxima computes a position estimate at each epoch. Results from multiple epoches are combined together to further decrease the false alarm rate and improve the target localization accuracy. Our algorithms have low computation and communication overheads. Simulation study demonstrates the validity and efficiency of our design.

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