Tracking by Risky Particle Filtering over Sensor Networks

The system of wireless sensor networks is high of interest due to a large number of demanded applications, such as the Internet of Things (IoT). The positioning of targets is one of crucial problems in wireless sensor networks. Particularly, in this paper, we propose minimax particle filtering (PF) for tracking a target in wireless sensor networks where multiple-RSS-measurements of received signal strength (RSS) are available at networked-sensors. The minimax PF adopts the maximum risk when computing the weights of particles, which results in the decreased variance of the weights and the immunity against the degeneracy problem of generic PF. Via the proposed approach, we can obtain improved tracking performance beyond the asymptotic-optimal performance of PF from a probabilistic perspective. We show the validity of the employed strategy in the applications of various PF variants, such as auxiliary-PF (APF), regularized-PF (RPF), Kullback–Leibler divergence-PF (KLDPF), and Gaussian-PF (GPF), besides the standard PF (SPF) in the problem of tracking a target in wireless sensor networks.