Sensor network virtualization is a promising paradigm to move away from highlycustomized, application-specific wireless sensor networks deployment by opening up to the possibility of dynamically assigning general purpose physical resources to multiple stakeholder applications. In this field, this paper introduces an optimization framework to perform the allocation of physical shared resources of wireless sensor networks to multiple requesting applications. The proposed optimization framework aims at maximizing the total number of applications which can share a common physical network, while accounting for the distinguishing characteristics and limitations of the wireless sensor environment (limited storage, limited processing power, limited bandwidth, tight energy consumption requirements). Due to the complexity of the optimization problem, a heuristic algorithm is also proposed. The proposed framework is finally applied to realistic network topologies to provide a detailed performance evaluation and to assess the gain involved in letting multiple applications share a common physical network with respect to one-application, one-network vertical design approaches.

翻译：传感器网络虚拟化是一种极具前景的范式，它通过将通用物理资源动态分配给多个利益相关方应用，打破了传统无线传感器网络高度定制化、面向特定应用的部署模式。本文在该领域提出了一种优化框架，用于将无线传感器网络的共享物理资源分配给多个请求应用。所提出的优化框架旨在最大化可共享同一物理网络的应用数量，同时考虑无线传感器环境的独特特征与限制（有限的存储容量、有限的处理能力、有限的带宽、严格的能耗要求）。鉴于优化问题的复杂性，本文还提出了一种启发式算法。最终将该框架应用于实际网络拓扑，通过详细的性能评估，量化了多应用共享同一物理网络相较于传统“一应用一网络”垂直设计方法的性能增益。