Energy Efficient Virtual Network Embedding in Virtualized Wireless Sensor Networks

In traditional Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) the applications are embedded in sensor nodes, making them application-oriented, domain-specific devices. Virtualization is a promising approach to allow several applications to use the physical resources of the same deployed WSN. Given that WSN sensor nodes hold limited available energy, efficient allocation and utilization of resources become important. In this paper, we study the problem of virtual network embedding in virtualized WSNs in a static setting. Our objective is to minimize the overall energy consumption by embedding the application virtual network requests onto the physical WSN substrate network. We formulate the problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP), accounting for latency as the service-level agreement (SLA). We then propose our so-called E2NE heuristic to achieve a near-optimal solution in a computationally efficient manner. Our results show that embedding virtual sensor networks in a virtualized WSN leads to more energy efficiency than embedding the same networks in traditional WSN without any support for virtualization. This is largely due to the fact that more physical sensors need to be activated in traditional WSN because each physical sensor can run one and only one task at a time.