A Survey on Virtualization of Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining tremendous importance thanks to their broad range of commercial applications such as in smart 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 specific WSN domains, communication barriers, conflicting goals and the economic interests of different WSN sensor node vendors, it is difficult to introduce a large scale federated WSN. By allowing heterogeneous sensor nodes in WSNs to coexist on a shared physical sensor substrate, virtualization in sensor network may provide flexibility, cost effective solutions, 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. Our focus in this paper is to introduce a few design goals, the challenges and opportunities of research in the field of sensor network virtualization as well as to illustrate a current status of research in this field. This paper also presents a wide array of state-of-the art projects related to sensor network virtualization

System-level virtualization and Mobile IP to support service mobility

In many areas of ICT the use of virtualization techniques has decoupled the binding between physical resources and functional roles assigned to them. While the use of virtualization in computing systems is already extremely popular, similar forms of virtualization have been proposed for the network infrastructure as well. In such a context, we propose a new paradigm that aims at extending the concept of virtualization to network services, by decoupling service execution environments and their physical location. We call this paradigm Service Switching. In a Service Switching environment, service instances may be dynamically migrated across geographically dispersed data centers to pursue better usage of both network and computing resources

System-level virtualization and Mobile IP to support service mobility

In many areas of ICT the use of virtualization techniques has decoupled the binding between physical resources and functional roles assigned to them. While the use of virtualization in computing systems is already extremely popular, similar forms of virtualization have been proposed for the network infrastructure as well. In such a context, we propose a new paradigm that aims at extending the concept of virtualization to network services, by decoupling service execution environments and their physical location. We call this paradigm Service Switching. In a Service Switching environment, service instances may be dynamically migrated across geographically dispersed data centers to pursue better usage of both network and computing resources