Coordinated target tracking in sensor networks by maximizing mutual information

Abstract This paper addresses the problem of coordinated target tracking in sensor networks. For a typical target tracking scene with nonlinear bearing-only measurements, we first investigate the mutual information between multiple sensors and the target state. To improve the performance of target tracking, we analyzed the relative positions between sensor agents and the target to be tracked and derived the optimal positions for sensors in the network by mutual information maximization. Simulation results are presented and discussed to demonstrate that the performance of estimated target states could be improved by the proposed method.