Self-stabilising target counting in wireless sensor networks using Euler integration

Abstract

Target counting is an established challenge for sensor networks: given a set of sensors that can count (but not identify) targets, how many targets are there? The problem is complicated because of the need to disambiguate duplicate observations of the same target by different sensors. A number of approaches have been proposed in the literature, and in this paper we take an existing technique based on Euler integration and develop a fully-distributed, self-stabilising solution. We derive our algorithm within the field calculus from the centralised presentation of the underlying integration technique, and analyse the precision of the counting through simulation of several network configurations.