Editorial for Chinacom2010 Special Issue

Excerpt

This special issue features four selected papers with high quality from the conference Chinacom 2010, which was held in Beijing, China, August 25–27, 2010. The first article, “Distributed Active Sensor Scheduling for Target Tracking in Ultrasonic Sensor Networks”, from Fan Zhang, Jiming Chen, Hongbin Li, Youxian Sun, and Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, investigates sensor scheduling issues in target tracking systems using ultrasonic sensors. The essential problem is how to select proper sensors at the right time to achieve better target tracking performance including tracking accuracy and reduced energy-consumption. Traditional approaches have some drawbacks. For example, periodic sensor scheduling simply picks each sensor in turn to detect the target without considering if the selected sensor is in the vicinity of the target or not. In order to overcome those shortcomings in existing schemes, the authors propose distributed and dynamic sensor scheduling (DSS), which leverages carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) to distributed coordinate tasking sensors so that only one sensor close to the vicinity of the target triggers ranging operation at a time. As a result, inter-sensor interference is removed. In addition, the current tasking sensor will stop ranging operation immediately once it completes so that other sensors can perform ranging. As well demonstrated in extensive simulations and real experiments, DSS achieves higher tracking accuracy and scalability than existent solutions especially under large scale ultrasonic sensor networks. …