• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.514-527
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• 2009

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used in various applications for military or environmental purpose. Recently, there are lots of on-going researches for detecting and tracking the spread of continuous objects or phenomena such as poisonous gas, wildfires, earthquakes, and so on. Some previous work has proposed techniques to detect edge nodes of such a continuous object based on the information of all the 1-hop neighbor nodes. In those techniques, however, a number of nodes are redundantly selected as edge nodes, and thus, the boundary of the continuous object cannot be presented accurately. In this paper, we propose a new edge detection method in which edge nodes of the continuous object are detected based on the information of the neighbor nodes obtained via the Localized Delaunay Triangulation so that a minimum number of nodes are selected as edge nodes. We also define the sensor behavior rule for tracking continuous objects energy-efficiently. Our simulation results show that the proposed edge detection method provides enhanced performance compared with previous 1-hop neighbor node based methods. On the average, the accuracy is improved by 29.95% while the number of edge nodes, the amount of communication messages and energy consumption are reduced by 54.43%, 79.36% and 72.34%, respectively. Moreover, the number of edge nodes decreases by 48.38% on the average in our field test with MICAz motes.