Wireless Sensor Network Virtualization: A Survey

TL;DR

This survey reviews the current state of wireless sensor network virtualization, discussing its importance for IoT, analyzing existing solutions, and identifying research challenges for enabling multi-application sharing on WSNs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of WSN virtualization, critically evaluates existing works, and discusses key research issues and future directions.

Findings

WSN virtualization enables multi-application sharing.

Existing solutions vary in architecture and capabilities.

Research challenges include resource management and security.

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are the key components of the emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm. They are now ubiquitous and used in a plurality of application domains. WSNs are still domain specific and usually deployed to support a specific application. However, as WSN nodes are becoming more and more powerful, it is getting more and more pertinent to research how multiple applications could share a very same WSN infrastructure. Virtualization is a technology that can potentially enable this sharing. This paper is a survey on WSN virtualization. It provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art and an in-depth discussion of the research issues. We introduce the basics of WSN virtualization and motivate its pertinence with carefully selected scenarios. Existing works are presented in detail and critically evaluated using a set of requirements derived from the scenarios. The pertinent research projects are also reviewed. Several research issues are also discussed with hints on how they could be tackled.