Virtualization in Wireless Sensor Network: Challenges and Opportunities

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining importance for their broad range of commercial applications such as in home automation, health-care and industrial automation. In these applications multi-vendor and heterogeneous sensor nodes are deployed. Due to strict administrative control over the WSN domains, communication barrier, conflicting goal & economic interest of different vendors of sensor node in WSN make it difficult to introduce a large scale federated WSN. By allowing heterogeneous wireless sensor networks to coexist on a shared physical substrate, virtualization in sensor network may provide flexibility, promote diversity, ensure security and increase manageability. This paper surveys the novel approach of using the large scale federated WSN resources in a sensor virtualization environment. In this paper we propose sensor virtualization architecture and focus on the challenges and opportunities of research in the field of sensor network virtualization as well as to illustrate a picture of current researches in this field.