Mutual-information based weighted fusion for target tracking in underwater wireless sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) can provide a promising solution to underwater target tracking. Due to limited energy and bandwidth resources, only a small number of nodes are selected to track a target at each interval. Because all measurements are fused together to provide information in a fusion center, fusion weights of all selected nodes may affect the performance of target tracking. As far as we know, almost all existing tracking schemes neglect this problem. We study a weighted fusion scheme for target tracking in UWSNs. First, because the mutual information (MI) between a node’s measurement and the target state can quantify target information provided by the node, it is calculated to determine proper fusion weights. Second, we design a novel multi-sensor weighted particle filter (MSWPF) using fusion weights determined by MI. Third, we present a local node selection scheme based on posterior Cramer-Rao lower bound (PCRLB) to improve tracking efficiency. Finally, simulation results are presented to verify the performance improvement of our scheme with proper fusion weights.