Fast Sensor Scheduling for Spatially Distributed Heterogeneous Sensors

Abstract

This paper addresses a sensor scheduling problem for a class of networked sensor systems whose sensors are spatially distributed and measurements are influenced by state dependent noise. Sensor scheduling is required to achieve power saving since each sensor operates with a battery power source. A networked sensor system usually consists of a large number of sensors, but the sensors can be classified into a few different types. We therefore introduce a concept of sensor types in the sensor model to provide fast sensor scheduling algorithms for a class of networked sensor systems. The computation time of the proposed algorithms is exponential in the number of the sensor types, while that of standard algorithms increases exponentially with the number of the sensors.