IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 63, NO.

22, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

6049

Compressive Sensing Based Probabilistic

Sensor Management for Target Tracking in
Wireless Sensor Networks
Yujiao Zheng, Student Member, IEEE, Nianxia Cao, Student Member, IEEE, Thakshila Wimalajeewa, Member, IEEE,
and Pramod K. Varshney, Fellow, IEEE

AbstractIn this paper, we consider the problem of sensor management for target tracking in a wireless sensor network (WSN).
To determine the set of sensors with the most informative data, we
develop a probabilistic sensor management scheme based on the
concepts developed in compressive sensing. In the proposed scheme
where each sensor transmits its observation with a certain probability via a coherent multiple access channel (MAC), the observation vector received at the fusion center becomes a compressed
version of the original observations. In this framework, the sensor
management problem can be cast as the problem of nding the
probability of transmission at each node so that a given performance metric is optimized. Our goal is to determine the optimal
values of the probabilities of transmission so that the trace of the
Fisher information matrix (FIM) is maximized at any given time
instant with a constraint on the available energy. We consider two
cases, where the fusion center has i) complete information and ii)
only partial information, regarding the sensor transmissions. The
expression for FIM is derived for both cases and the optimal values
of the probabilities of transmission are found accordingly. With
nonidentical probabilities, we obtain the results numerically while
under the assumption that each sensor transmits with equal probability, we obtain the optimal values analytically. We provide numerical results to illustrate the performance of the proposed probabilistic sensor management scheme.
Index TermsCompressive sensing, sensor management, target
tracking, wireless sensor networks.

I. INTRODUCTION

typical wireless sensor network (WSN) is composed of

a large number of densely deployed sensors, where sensors are assumed to be tiny, battery-powered devices with limited signal processing capabilities. When programmed and networked properly, WSNs are very useful in many application

Manuscript received August 01, 2014; revised March 15, 2015 and July 13,
2015; accepted July 18, 2015. Date of publication August 04, 2015; date of
current version October 06, 2015. The associate editor coordinating the review
of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. John McAllister.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. 1307775 and U.S. Air Force Ofce of Scientic
Research (AFOSR) under Grant No. FA9550-10-1-0458. A part of this work
was presented at ICASSP, Florence, Italy, 2014.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244 USA (e-mail: yuzheng@syr.
edu; ncao@syr.edu; twwewelw@syr.edu; varshney@syr.edu).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TSP.2015.2464197

areas including battleeld surveillance [1], environment monitoring and target tracking [2], industrial processes [3] and health
monitoring and control [4]. In this paper, we assume that the task
of the WSN is to track a target emitting energy in a given region
of interest (ROI). The sensors in the ROI report their measurements to a central node called the fusion center which is responsible for the nal inference.
Typical WSNs have limited resources (energy, bandwidth),
and the sensors are deployed in the ROI densely. Thus, instead
of simply having all the sensors transmit all the time, proper
management and programming of a subset of sensors that
should transmit their observations is very important. Different
approaches have been proposed to solve the sensor management problem in the literature for various inference tasks. To
name a few, in [5], the sensor selection problem was formulated
as an integer programming problem, which was relaxed and
solved through convex optimization. In [6], a multi-step sensor
selection strategy by reformulating the Kalman lter was proposed, which was able to address different performance metrics
and constraints on available resources. In [7], a sensor selection
scheme based on an entropy-based information measure was
proposed. The recursive posterior Cramr-Rao lower bound
(PCRLB) on the mean squared error (MSE) has been explored
as the metric to select informative sensors in [8] and [9]. To
decide which sensors are important, the innovation of each
sensor which is dened as the difference between the current
measurement and the predicted measurement has been utilized
in [10]. In [11], the nondominating sorting genetic algorithm-II
method was employed for the multi-objective optimization
based sensor selection problem. In [12], the authors aimed
to nd the optimal sparse collaboration topologies subject to
a certain information or energy constraint in the context of
distributed estimation. For a more complete literature review on
sensor management for target tracking, see [13] and references
therein.
In a densely deployed WSN, since only a few nodes have
signicant observations, the concatenated measurement vector
can be considered to be sparse and compressible. In [13][16],
a sparse formulation is exploited to reduce the number of selected sensors. In [13], the problem of periodic sensor scheduling was addressed by seeking the optimal sparse estimator
gain, where a one-to-one correspondence between active sensors and the nonzero columns of the estimator gain was established. In [14], the design of the sensor selection scheme was
transformed to the recovery of a sparse matrix. In [15] and [16],

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a sparsity-aware sensor selection problem was formulated by

minimizing the number of selected sensors subject to a certain
estimation quality. The concept of compressive sensing (CS)
has been discussed in [17] and [18]. The authors in [19] introduced the application of CS to radar sensor networks. They
showed that the signal samples along the time domain could be
substantially compressed so that signals could be recovered by a
small number of measurements. Also, the maximum likelihood
(ML) algorithm was developed for parameter estimation and the
Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) was provided to validate the
theoretical result. In [20], a multiple target localization approach
was proposed by formulating the multiple target locations as a
sparse matrix, and the target locations were recovered from the
noisy measurements through -minimization. The rst attempt
to solve the sensor management problem by CS was presented
in [21], in which the sensor selection decision was considered as
a sparse signal, and the sensor selection problem was solved in
terms of recovering the sparse signal by norm minimization.
However, the probabilistic sensor management problem using
the compressed data from the sparse observations of the sensors has not been considered in the above references.
In this paper, we propose a novel CS based sensor management approach for target tracking in a WSN. Since not all the
sensors contain informative observations regarding the target at
a given time instant, the observation vector has only a few signicant elements. Thus, it is sufcient to forward only those signicant elements to the fusion center to perform target tracking
instead of forwarding all the measurements which consumes
a large amount of energy. To get a compressed version of the
observations at the fusion center, we employ a multiple access
channel (MAC) with probabilistic transmissions. Use of a MAC
model to get a compressed version of observations has been
discussed by several authors, for example, [22] and [23]. In
this approach, each sensor multiplies its measurement with a
random scalar drawn from a given distribution and transmits
it via a MAC. Then, the received observation vector at the fusion center has an equivalent representation as with the standard CS problem. With this model, the corresponding sensing
matrix at the fusion center is completely determined by each
sensors probability of transmission. Under this framework, our
goal is to design the sensing matrix considering two cases: 1)
the fusion center has complete measurement sparsity information (CMSI), and, 2) the fusion center has partial measurement
sparsity information (PMSI). With CMSI, the fusion center generates the sensing matrix based on the transmission probabilities
of the sensors. With PMSI, the fusion center sends the transmission probabilities to the sensors once it gets the optimal solutions. Then the sensors generate the sensing matrix based on
their own transmission probabilities and decide whether or not
they should transmit their observations to the fusion center. It
is noted that, with CMSI, the fusion center has to inform which
sensor should transmit during each MAC transmission, while
with PMSI, the fusion center sends only the probability values
to each node which is the same for all MAC transmissions. Thus,
in terms of the communication burden required by the feedback channel (fusion center to sensor nodes), the PMSI based
method is more efcient than the CMSI method. However, simulation results show that the CMSI method is capable of pro-

viding better tracking performance compared to the PMSI based

method when the processing noise is relatively large. Under
both schemes, we obtain the optimal values of transmission
probabilities that generate the measurement matrix so that a
given performance metric for target tracking is optimized.
An initial version of this work was reported in [24], where we
studied only the CMSI case. In the current work, we extend the
work reported in [24] in several directions:
We develop a probabilistic sensor management scheme for
target tracking based on compressed measurements considering PMSI in addition to the CMSI case as considered
in [24].
When the sensor nodes transmit their observations with
nonidentical probabilities, we formulate the sensor management problem as a quasi-convex optimization problem
and obtain the optimal values via a linear program for both
CMSI and PMSI cases.
With identical probabilities of transmission, the theoretical
results provide us with some intuitive insights into the impact of the energy constraint, the number of sensors in the
ROI, and the number of MACs on the performance of the
CS based target tracking problem.
While a CS based sensor management approach for WSNs
has been discussed in [21], there are several major differences
between our work and the work presented in [21]: 1) The authors
in [21] considered a linear system while our model is nonlinear
and is, thus, more general. 2) In [21], a subset of sensors is selected and the selected sensors send their measurements to the
fusion center over parallel channels. In this paper, a subset of
sensors is chosen probabilistically and different superpositions
of weighted measurements are sent to the fusion center over
MACs. 3) In [21], the sensor selection decision is considered
as a sparse signal and the sensor selection problem is solved by
recovering the sparse signal by norm minimization. In this
paper, the concatenated measurement vector is considered to be
sparse due to the presence of non-informative measurements,
and the sensing matrix is designed such that a desired tracking
performance is achieved with compressed measurements. Thus,
there is no recovery of signal, but the compressed signal is used
directly for state inference; 4) In [21], the sensing matrix is deterministic or is made semi-random by adding some random
disturbance, while in this paper, elements of the sensing matrix
are random variables whose distributions are related to sensors
probabilities of transmission.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section II,
we introduce the formulation of our problem. In Section III, particle ltering based Fisher information matrix (FIM) for CMSI
and PMSI are derived. We present the optimization problem for
probabilistic sensor management in Section IV and the numerical experiments in Section V, respectively. Our work is concluded in Section VI.
II. PROBLEM FORMULATION
A. System Model
sensors which are deWe consider a WSN consisting of
ployed uniformly in a square region of interest (ROI) of size

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. Note that our approach can handle any sensor deployment pattern as long as the sensor locations
for all
are known in advance. We assume that the target and
all the sensors are based on a at ground, so that we can formulate the problem with a 2-D model. We focus on a target tracking
problem, where a moving acoustic or electromagnetic target is
tracked by the WSN. The dynamics of the target is dened by a
4-dimensional state vector
where
is the location of the target at time instant and ,
are the
velocities in the and directions. The model of the target motion is assumed to be
(1)
is the process noise
where is the state transition model and
which is assumed to be Gaussian with mean zero and covariance
matrix .
At time , the measurement model at each sensor is
(2)
where
,
is the signal power of the
source, is the signal decay parameter,
denotes the distance between the target and the th sensor at time , i.e.,
, where
is the location of the th sensor, and
is the measurement noise, which
is assumed to be Gaussian with mean zero and variance and
mutually independent over for
.
Let the measurement vector be
at time
, where
denotes the matrix or vector transpose. We consider a relatively large distributed network. Based on the observation model (2), it is seen that the signal amplitude received
at a given node at a given time becomes smaller and eventually negligible as the distance between that particular node and
the true target location increases. Therefore, at time ,
contains only a few signicant values. This
motivates us to consider a scheme where only a compressed
version of
is transmitted to the fusion center instead of the
complete observation vector .
B. Compressive Sensing (CS)
For a densely deployed WSN, the signal measurements are
considered to be sparse and compressible. CS is a recently developed signal processing technique for acquiring and reconstructing a sparse signal with a small number of measurements
compared to the original signal dimension. Consider a signal
, that can be expressed in an orthonormal basis
as

where

is the coefcient of the signal projected on to

and
. The signal is said to be -sparse, if only
coefcients in are signicant and all the others are zeros or
negligible.
To get a compressed signal, the sparse signal is projected
to a lower dimension via a sensing matrix with dimension
, where
, i.e.,

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Then, the standard CS problem is to recover from only

measurements . The reconstruction capability is determined by the properties of the sensing matrix in addition to
the sparsity index and the number of compressed measurements
[17]. Several such properties including restricted isometry property (RIP) and mutual coherence of the sensing matrix, and recovery algorithms are discussed in [25][27].
C. Sparsity Formulation of Sensor Management Problem
To obtain a compressed version of observations at the fusion
center, we consider the following transmission scheme as considered in [23]. In particular, to get a compressed version of
the observations at the fusion center, we employ a multiple access channel (MAC) based communication scheme with probabilistic transmissions. In this approach, each sensor multiplies
its measurement with a random scalar, which denotes whether
or not to transmit its measurement to the fusion center, drawn
from a given distribution and transmits it via a MAC. Then, the
received observation vector at the fusion center is a compressed
version of the original observation vector and has an equivalent representation as in the standard CS problem. Let the th
sensor transmit its measurement after multiplying it by
(to
be dened later) via a MAC, so that after
transmissions, the
received signal at the fusion center is given by
(3)
where
is the receiver noise, which is assumed to be white
and Gaussian with mean zero and variance . Note that (3) can
be written in a vector form as
(4)
, the
-th element of
is
where
given by
for
and
, and
is
the receiver noise, which is assumed to be white Gaussian with
mean zero and covariance matrix
, where
is an identity matrix of size
.
We consider each
to be a random variable so that
with prob.
with prob.
with prob.

(5)

where
is the probability of transmission of th sensor at
time instant .
Based on how
is constructed, it is obvious that, though the
elements in a given column in
are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), elements in different columns are independent but not identically distributed. It is noted that, the matrix
can be very sparse when only a small number of sensors
decide to transmit with a high probability. With this sensing matrix, we show numerically in Section V that compressed observations in (4) provide us with tracking performance comparable
to that with (2) with relatively small .
In the context of sensor management,
plays the role of
a sensor management entity that divides the sensors into
subsets. Sensors in the same subset send their superimposed
measurements over the same MAC (there are a total of

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MACs) if FDMA is used or in the same time slot (there are a

total of
time slots) if TDMA is used. Note that, the weight
could be 0, which means that the associated sensor does not
send its measurement. In this scenario, the sensor observations
are compressed from dimension to , and the compression
is achieved as a result of coherent transmission over MAC channels (either with FDMA or TDMA). Therefore, the problem of
managing sensors is equivalent to the design of the sensing matrix
or the probability vector
,
such that a certain objective function is optimized. In our paper,
we choose the Fisher information, which is the inverse of
the bound on the mean squared error of the estimator namely
PCRLB, as our optimization criterion, i.e., we address this
probabilistic sensor management problem so that the trace of
the FIM is maximized at each time step .
III. FISHER INFORMATION MATRIX
TARGET TRACKING

FOR

CS BASED

and decides the selection state of each sensor, so that it has

complete information about the sensing matrix
. Then the
conditional probability
can be applied to
obtain
; 2) the fusion center sends the transmission probability
to sensor
, and sensor generates
corresponding to its selection probability. In this case, the fusion center does not have the exact
values of
. Thus,
is computed by averaging
over the sensing matrix
.
A. Fisher Information Matrix With Complete Measurement
Sparsity Information (CMSI)
With complete sparsity information,
the conditional probability

is calculated from
,
(7)

where the expectation is with respect to the joint distribution

. Hence,

In our framework, the fusion center decides the transmission

probabilities of the sensors, and then communicates with the
sensors to get the compressed data through the MACs. Thus,
regarding the communication scheme between the fusion center
and the sensors, the natural question is, who decides the sensing
matrix
in (4)? We consider two different cases: 1) the fusion
center generates the sensing matrix and informs the sensors as
to which sensors are to transmit during each MAC transmission,
in which case the fusion center has CMSI; and, 2) the fusion
center sends only the transmission probabilities of the sensors,
in this case, the sensors generate the sensing matrix and decide
how they send their observations to the fusion center, i.e., the
fusion center has PMSI. Therefore, before proceeding with the
optimization problem, in this section, we nd the FIM as a function of the transmission probabilities of the sensors for the two
different transmission schemes.
For the target tracking problem under consideration, a nice
recursive computation of the FIM at time
,
, is proposed in [28], which is given as follows

(8)
where
(9)
Notice that the second expectation in (9) is with respect to
. Recall (4), where we have
(10)
where
, i.e., it is the concatenation
of the measurement noises of sensors. Since the measurement
noises are mutually independent,
, where
represents the multivariate Gaussian distribution with
mean vector and the covariance matrix .
Given
and
, based on (10), one can get
, where
. Then

(6)
where

is the FIM at time , and

Therefore,

in (9) reduces to

(11)
where
,
,
,
,
denotes
In the above expressions for
is the state of the target
the probability density function,
,
is the measurement vector at time
,
at time
,
denotes the second derivative operator, namely
denotes the mathematand is the gradient operator, and
ical expectation.
For the problem considered in this paper, we have
,
,
. To compute
, it is required to compute
. It is noted that
depends on the random matrix . Here we consider two
different cases: 1) the fusion center generates the sensing matrix

and

ZHENG et al.: COMPRESSIVE SENSING BASED PROBABILISTIC SENSOR MANAGEMENT FOR TARGET TRACKING IN WSNs

for
. Note that
is the location of the th
sensor and
represents the location of the target at
time
.
Letting
, we observe that it is
difcult to obtain
directly. Thus, in the following proposition, we employ some approximations when is large.
Proposition 1: If the number of sensors
in the WSN is
large, then, at any given time
, we may approximate

where
denotes a diagonal matrix, with
on the
main diagonal.
Proof: See Appendix A.
We see that Proposition 1 yields a diagonal formulation of
, which makes the relationship between
and
much more clear. Thus, we have

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(14)
Proof: See Appendix B.
Hence,

(15)
(16)
where

is a 4

4 matrix with

(12)
(13)
where

and

Note that in (13) we take the expectation of

because
is the only element that is related to the target state
. Therefore, the FIM for the CMSI case is computed by
substituting
in (13) back to (6).
B. Fisher Information Matrix With Partial Measurement
Sparsity Information (PMSI)
In this subsection, we consider the second case where the sensors generate sensing matrix
based on
by themselves and the fusion center does not have the exact information
regarding
. In this case, to compute
,
is computed as

With similar approximations as considered in Section III-A, we

have the following proposition.
Proposition 2: If the number of sensors
is large, then, at
any given time
, we may approximate

All the other elements in

are zeros. Also note that in (16) we
take the expectation of
because
is the only
element that is related to the target state
. Thus, the FIM for
the PMSI case is computed by substituting
in (16) back
to (6).
C. Particle Filter Based Fisher Information Matrix
After computing the FIM for CMSI and PMSI cases, in this
subsection, we briey introduce particle lters and give simpler
expressions of the FIM with the help of particle lters. Since
particle ltering is a general ltering procedure that can be applied to any state-space model and thus is more general than
the Kalman lter [29], we apply particle ltering for our nonlinear model to track the target. In particle ltering, the main
idea is to nd a discrete representation of the posterior distribution
by using a set of particles
with associated weights
. The posterior density at
can be
approximated as,

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where
is the Dirac delta measure and
denotes the total
number of particles. We employ the sequential importance resampling (SIR) particle ltering algorithm [29] to solve the nonlinear Bayesian ltering problem. Algorithm 1 provides a summary of SIR particle ltering for sensor selection. A more detailed treatment of particle ltering can be found in a wide variety of publications such as [29].
Algorithm 1: SIR Particle Filter with Probabilistic Sensor
Management for Target Tracking
Set

. Generate
initial particles
.
while
do
a) Propagating particles:

with

b) Obtain sensor data

based on the sensor
measurements through the MAC of
transmissions.
c) Updating weights:
(for CMSI)
(for PMSI)
d) Normalizing weights:

where

is different for the two cases,

for CMSI
for PMSI.

Proof: We get (19) by substituting (17) and (18) back into

(13) and (16).
IV. THE SENSOR MANAGEMENT PROBLEM
Having computed the FIM in Section III for both CMSI and
PMSI cases, in this section, we focus on our CS based sensor
management problem in the WSN. We observe that for our
model, the problem of maximizing the determinant of the FIM in
(19) subject to the resource constraint is not convex, thus global
optimal solutions are not guaranteed, and the computation costs
will be high. Therefore, we solve the CS based resource management problem in a WSN by maximizing the trace of the FIM.
For simplicity, we assume that each transmission from a local
sensor to the fusion center consumes unit power. Finding the optimal values for transmit power at sensor nodes while achieving
a desired performance is an interesting aspect which will be
studied in the future. We aim to solve the following optimization problem:
(20a)

e) Target Estimation:
f) Resample:

(20b)

end while

(20c)

In Algorithm 1,
denotes the number of time steps over
which the target is tracked. For the rst case, i.e., CMSI,
is
according to (10),
and for the second case, i.e., PMSI,
is approximated by (14). The resampling step avoids the situation that all
but one of the importance weights are close to zero [29].
With particle ltering, expectation of
in (13) and
expectation of
in (16) can be written as
(17)
and
(18)
Thus, we provide the FIM of our system in the following
proposition.
Proposition 3: The FIM of our system for both the CMSI and
PMSI can be written as

(19)

where
denotes the trace of a matrix, is the total energy
constraint, and is the lower bound of the selection probability.
Here we impose a lower bound on the probability to avoid producing columns with all zeros in the measurement matrix .
In other words, we allow each node to transmit with a certain
nonzero probability.
At time step
, the fusion center rst solves the optimization problem in (20) to obtain the optimal
before measurements at this time are available. Then, 1) For the CMSI case
in III-A, the fusion center generates the sensing matrix
using
, and, according to which, sends control messages
to local sensors. Based on these control messages, local sensors send their measurements over assigned MACs to the fusion center. For the PMSI case in III-B, the fusion center sends
the transmission probability
to sensor
.
Based on its selection probability
, sensor generates
, according to which it sends its measurements to the fusion center.
A. With Identical Probabilities
We rst consider a simple scenario in which each sensor has
the same probability to be selected to transmit their measurements. Since from (19) we know that
does not depend on
the transmission probability of the sensors, the FIM for both the
CMSI and PMSI cases with the assumption of identical transmission probability
is

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The objective function of the optimization problem (20a) is

Thus, no matter whether or not the fusion center has complete

information about the sensing matrix , the resource management problem of (20) is equivalent to

, the objective func-

By denoting
tion is further expressed as

(24)
unit vector,
. The
where is a
objective function in (24) is a linear-fractional function, so that
the optimization problem is a quasilinear optimization problem
[30]. It has been shown in [30] that, as the feasible set

(21)
is an increasing function of , the
Since
optimal solution is simply the largest value that can achieve
under the constraints

is not nonempty, the linear-fractional problem (24) can be transformed to an equivalent linear program. We rst dene the following two variables

(22)
We observe that the optimal solution for such a simple scenario is no longer dependent on the FIM of each sensor, i.e.,
this formulation treats all the sensors to be equally important,
even though they make different contributions for tracking the
target. When we do not consider the case that every sensor has
probability 1 to transmit its measurements, we get some insights
from (22): 1) A larger energy constraint results in a higher
transmission probability for the sensors. 2) In the identical probability case, having more sensors in the WSN yields a lower
transmission probability for the sensors. It is because all the sensors are forced to transmit their measurements with the same
probability. 3) In the context of CS,
is the number of compressed measurements. A larger is supposed to yield a higher
probability to recover the original signal, so that better performance is expected. However, on the other hand, in (20b), the
value of
also decides the upper bound of the total selection
probability of the sensors, thus increasing
decreases the sensors transmission probability as shown in (22), which may yield
worse tracking performance. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff
between the accuracy of the recovered signal and tracking performance.
B. With Nonidentical Probabilities
Without the simplifying assumption that each sensor employs
an equal transmission probability, our optimization problem is,

such that once we get the optimal solutions for and , we can
also easily get the optimal values for the original variables .
The equivalent linear program optimization problem is

(25)
where

..
.

..
.

..

..
.

..
.

..
.

..

..
.

We apply the MATLAB function linprog to solve the constrained linear optimization problem (25). Having the optimal
solutions and , the transmission probabilities of the sensors
are
.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS

(23)
Note that
for CMSI
for PMSI.

In this section, we illustrate the performance of the proposed

sensor management algorithm by numerical examples. We compare the MSE of CMSI and PMSI presented in Section III-A and
Section III-B, respectively, with different process noise parameters. The MSE is computed through

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Fig. 1. Target trajectory and the estimated track with different sensor management schemes.

where
is the number of Monte Carlo trials. Also, the effect
of the parameters in the model, i.e., the energy constraint ,
the number of sensors
and the number of MACs ( of the
sensing matrix ) is evaluated.
We consider a WSN, consisting of
sensors grid deployed
in a
surveillance area. The dynamical
model of the target is given by (1). The state transition model
and the covariance of the process noise are given as follows:

where
is the sampling time interval and is
the process noise parameter. The parameters of the observation
model (2) are set as
and
. The initial state
of the target
is assumed to be Gaussian with mean
and covariance matrix
.
We perform target tracking over
time steps for each
Monte-Carlo trial, and set
particles for the particle
lter. The MSE of the estimation at each time is averaged over
Monte-Carlo trials.
In Fig. 1, a WSN is illustrated where
sensors track
a target with
MACs under the energy constraint
. We plot the true target trajectory, the estimated target
trajectory when all the sensors send their measurements to the
fusion center, the estimated target trajectory with the proposed
CS based sensor management method when the FC has CMSI
and the transmission probabilities of the sensors are nonidentical, and the estimated target trajectory under the random selection scheme. For the random selection scheme, the sensors are
randomly selected by the fusion center with probability
.
Thus, the random selection method is expected to give worse
tracking performance compared to the CS based sensor management method and the all-send case. It is also observed that
the proposed CMSI based scheme shows similar performance
as that of the all-send case.
In Fig. 2, we study the tracking performance with CMSI
and PMSI respectively. With
sensors in the ROI, we
compare the MSE under different process noise parameters.

Fig. 2. Comparing CMSI and PMSI via MSE with different noise parameters.

Note that under the identical probability condition, sensors

are equally important, so that whether the fusion center has
CMSI or PMSI does not affect the tracking performance. We
observe in Fig. 2(a) that when the process noise is small
, PMSI outperforms CMSI a little bit, and in
Fig. 2(b) when the noise is relatively large
, CMSI
performs much better than PMSI. The reason is that when the
process noise is small, the target motion model has relatively
smaller uncertainty about the predicted target location. Thus,
averaging the sensing matrix helps us get even better tracking
performance. However, when the process noise is relatively
large, the fusion center has higher uncertainty about the target
trajectory. Moreover, without having complete information
about the sensing matrix, the fusion center calculates the
weights of the particles in particle ltering with errors. Therefore, the fusion center is able to achieve better performance
with CMSI compared to PMSI.
Now we study the effect of the parameters in the WSN (the
energy constraint , the number of sensors and the number of
MACs) on the CS based sensor management problem. The performance is evaluated through the tracking performance under
the assumption that the process noise is
, and that the
fusion center has CMSI to track the target.
In Fig. 3, the tracking performance is illustrated when
sensors track a target with
MACs under
different energy constraints . In Fig. 3, we give the MSE
for
and
, to show the efciency of our model,
where Fig. 3(a) shows the MSEs when the sensors have nonidentical probabilities, and Fig. 3(b) shows the MSEs when
the sensors have identical probabilities. We also present the
MSE for the random selection method for both cases. Note
that for the random selection scheme, the sensors are randomly
selected with probability
in Fig. 3(a) and with probability
in Fig. 3(b) corresponding to the optimal solution in
(22). From both gures, we observe that when increases from
6 to 8, the MSE decreases for both the random selection and
the CS based approach, and the latter one always outperforms
the former under the same energy constraint. Both methods are
compared to the all-send case where all sensor measurements
are available at the fusion center via a set of parallel channels.
Compared to the all-send case where a total of 25 units of

ZHENG et al.: COMPRESSIVE SENSING BASED PROBABILISTIC SENSOR MANAGEMENT FOR TARGET TRACKING IN WSNs

Fig. 3. MSE for different energy constraints,

Fig. 4. MSE for different number of sensors,

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, 8 (a) Nonidentical probabilities. (b) Identical probabilities.

, 25, 36, 49 (a) Nonidentical probabilities. (b) Identical probability.

energy are consumed at each time since

parallel
transmissions are necessary, the proposed approach loses only
a little performance for both
and
cases.
In Fig. 4, we show the tracking performance for different
number of sensors
, 25, 36, 49 with the energy constraint
and the number of MACs
, where Fig. 4(a) shows
the MSEs when the sensors have nonidentical probabilities, and
Fig. 4(b) shows the MSEs when the sensors have identical probabilities. In Fig. 4(a), the MSEs show that the proposed approach
achieves a better performance as increases. This is because,
in target tracking without the strict constraint that every sensor
is equally important, the sensors which can obtain more informative observations in the ROI will be assigned higher probabilities. On the other hand, as the number of sensors in the ROI
increases, the density of the sensors increases, so that the fusion center has a better chance to activate even more informative
sensors. When the density is large enough, the tracking performance tends to saturate as shown in Fig. 4(a). However, from
Section IV-A, we know that under the assumption that all the
sensors have identical transmission probabilities, the transmission probability of the sensors becomes smaller as the number
of sensors in the ROI increases, so that the tracking performance
worsens as shown in Fig. 4(b). Note that in Fig. 4, in order to
clearly see that the number of sensors in the WSN affects the

tracking performance, we have set the number of MACs

to
be relative small, which results in divergence of the MSE especially when
is relatively small. We shows the effect of the
number of MACs
in Fig. 5.
In Fig. 5, the MSEs of the CS based approach with different
values are presented, where Fig. 5(a) shows the MSEs when
the sensors have nonidentical probabilities, and Fig. 5(b) shows
the MSEs when the sensors have identical probabilities. In
Fig. 5, we let
and
. As observed before, it is
seen from Fig. 5(a) and Fig. 5(b), that the tracking performance
is improved when nonidentical probabilities are assigned to
sensors compared to assigning identical probabilities under
the same energy constraints and the same number of MAC
transmissions. In both cases (identical and nonidentical probabilities) the performance is improved as M increases. However,
it is observed that the rate of performance improvement reduces
as M increases. It is noted that, in Section IV-A, we indicated
that with the identical transmission probability assumption, the
transmission probability of the sensors decreases as M increases
due to the energy constraint. However, the following reasons
justify the improvement of the tracking performance as M
increases (even though the transmission probability decreases):
1) As M, the number of MAC transmissions, increases the
fusion center receives different superpositions of the observa-

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING, VOL. 63, NO. 22, NOVEMBER 15, 2015

Fig. 5. MSEs for different number of MACs,

, 3, 4 (a) Nonidentical probabilities. (b) Identical probability.

tions from the sensors with good observations. This enables

the fusion center to better extract the most informative data
residing at distributed nodes. 2). M is the dimension of the
compressed observation vector received at the fusion center
in (4). In the context of CS with respect to complete signal
recovery, it has been shown in [31] that reliable recovery is
possible with a small number of compressive measurements
(compared to original signal dimension) even if the projection
matrix contains sparse random elements as long as the matrix
satises some required properties. Then, increasing M beyond
this particular value is not necessary. While these analyses
(e.g., [31]) may not be directly applicable to the scenario
considered in this paper, (where we consider tracking instead of
complete recovery when the random projection matrix contains
sparse nonidentical elements), it is intuitive that when M is
increased beyond a certain value, a signicant improvement in
performance is not observed. The performance of the proposed
approach is quite close to the all send case, especially when
, 4, but is energy efcient in the sense that it consumes
only
units of energy at any given time on an average.
Note that the compressed measurements are used directly for
state estimation in the considered target tracking problem,
which is different from the traditional CS problems where the
goal is to recover a sparse signal.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed a novel probabilistic sensor management approach for target tracking in sensor networks based
on compressed observations. With the proposed approach, the
sensor management problem becomes a constrained optimization problem, where the goal is to determine the optimal values
of probabilities that each sensor should transmit with such that
the trace of the FIM at any given time step is maximized. We derived the formulations for the FIM when the fusion center has
complete measurement sparsity information (CMSI) and partial
measurement sparsity information (PMSI). Theoretical results
for the case when each sensor employs identical transmission
probability give us useful insights into the impact of the three
important parameters of our model. Numerical results for both
the identical probability case and the more general nonidentical

transmission probabilities case show that the proposed approach

saves a lot of energy with a little performance loss compared to
the optimal scenario in which all sensor observations are transmitted to the fusion center via parallel channels. Under the same
energy constraint, the proposed scheme outperforms the random
selection approach signicantly. An interesting future work is to
take the channel statistics into consideration.
APPENDIX A
PROOF OF PROPOSITION 1
. Note that in this proof the time index is
Let
omitted for the sake of simplicity. Diagonal elements of are
given by

and off-diagonal elements are

It is straightforward to obtain

,
,

, and
.
Therefore, according to the law of large number (LLN) for
independent and nonidentical random variables, we get

Hence,

and
(26)

Then,

ZHENG et al.: COMPRESSIVE SENSING BASED PROBABILISTIC SENSOR MANAGEMENT FOR TARGET TRACKING IN WSNs

Diagonal elements of

are given by

REFERENCES

and off-diagonal elements are

Therefore,

completing the proof.

APPENDIX B
PROOF OF PROPOSITION 2
Based

on

Eq.

(10), one
, where

6059

can

get
.

Then we have

With LLN, we have the approximation for

Then

as in (26).

and

(27)
According to LLN, we can get approximations
(28)
and
(29)
Therefore, the proof is completed by substituting (28) and (29)
into (27).

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Yujiao Zheng (S13) received her B.S. degree

in electronic engineering and information science
from University of Science and Technology of
China (USTC) in 2008, M.S. degree in electrical
engineering and Ph.D. degree in electrical and
computer engineering from Syracuse University,
Syracuse, NY, in 2011 and 2014 respectively. Her
research interests are in the areas of statistical signal
processing with its application in target tracking,
sensor management, and compressive sensing.
She received the Best Student Paper Award at the
Thirteenth International Conference on Information Fusion in 2010.

Nianxia Cao (S12) received the B.S. and M.S.

degrees in control theory and control engineering
from Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU),
Xian, China, in 2009 and 2012. She has been
pursuing the Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse
University since 2012. Her research interests include
statistical signal processing, sensor management
in the wireless sensor networks, game theory, and
mechanism design.

Thakshila Wimalajeewa (M15) received the B.Sc.

degree in electronic and telecommunication engineering with First Class Honors from the University
of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, in 2004 and the M.S., and
Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering
from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque,
NM in 2007 and 2009, respectively.
She spent 20102012 as a postdoctoral research
associate in the Department of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science, Syracuse University (SU),
Syracuse, NY. She currently holds a research faculty
position at SU. Her research interests lie in the broad areas of communication
theory, signal processing and information theory. Her current research focuses
on compressive sensing, low dimensional signal processing for communication
systems, blind signal recognition, and resource optimization in distributed
sensor networks.

Pramod K. Varshney (S72M77SM82F97)

was born in Allahabad, India, on July 1, 1952. He
received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering
and computer science (with highest honors), and
the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering
from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
in 1972, 1974, and 1976 respectively.
From 1972 to 1976, he held teaching and research
assistantships with the University of Illinois. Since
1976, he has been with Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, where he is currently a Distinguished
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Director
of CASE: Center for Advanced Systems and Engineering. He served as the
Associate Chair of the department from 1993 to 1996. He is also an Adjunct
Professor of Radiology at Upstate Medical University, Syracuse. His current
research interests are in distributed sensor networks and data fusion, detection
and estimation theory, wireless communications, image processing, radar
signal processing, and remote sensing. He has published extensively. He is the
author of Distributed Detection and Data Fusion (New York: Springer-Verlag,
1997). He has served as a consultant to several major companies.
Dr. Varshney was a James Scholar, a Bronze Tablet Senior, and a Fellow
while at the University of Illinois. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and is the
recipient of the 1981 ASEE Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award. He was
elected to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in 1997 for his contributions in the
area of distributed detection and data fusion. He was the Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Data Fusion of the IEEE PROCEEDINGS January 1997. In 2000, he
received the Third Millennium Medal from the IEEE and Chancellors Citation
for exceptional academic achievement at Syracuse University. He is the recipient of the IEEE 2012 Judith A. Resnik Award. He is on the Editorial Boards of
the Journal on Advances in Information Fusion and IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING
MAGAZINE. He was the President of International Society of Information Fusion
during 2001.