Intelligent wireless sensor network sensor selection and clustering for tracking unmanned aerial vehicles

Sensor selection is a vital part of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) management. This becomes of increased importance when considering the use of low-cost, bearing-only sensor nodes for the tracking of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). However, traditional techniques commonly form excessively large sensor clusters, which result in the collection of redundant information, which can deteriorate performance while also increasing the associated network costs. Therefore, this work combines a predictive posterior distribution methodology with a novel simplified objective function for optimally identifying and forming smaller sensor clusters before activation and measurement collection. The goal of the proposed objective function is to reduce network communication and computation costs while still maintaining the tracking performance of using far more sensors. The developed optimisation algorithm results in reducing the size of selected sensor clusters by an average of 50% while still maintaining the tracking performance of general traditional techniques.