Towards an Efficient and Secure Virtual Wireless Sensor Networks Framework

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vastly used for a huge range of applications such as object tracking, observation surrounding environment, health care, manufacturing automation, and smart homes. A WSN application would have central controlling modules that control the deployment and management process for the underlying WSN. Virtualization in WSN is a recent trend that aims to create a framework that helps in separating the traditional structure of the WSN. This paper purposes a novel framework for virtual sensor networks. The proposed framework uses a virtual middleware layer that separates the application layer and the WSN sensor node infrastructure layer. This layer offers mechanisms to handle different issues, including security, routing, and aggregating resources from multiple Physical WSN infrastructures to be used by a single application. In addition, Virtual sensor networks will impose a number of unique and new conceptual and technical challenges to be considered in the traditional wireless sensor network. There are a few reasons that motivate us to work towards providing a novel virtual sensor network architecture: (i) Provide flexibility by Allowing WSN to perform different tasks even when deployed in the same geographical region, (ii) Provide cost effective solutions, (iii) Promote variety, and (iv) Increase manageability and ensure security. An evaluation will be performed to benchmark the proposed framework against a traditional baseline. The evaluation results will demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed framework against other benchmarks in terms of packet delivery rate, network lifetime, and stability period.