Abstract Current focus of sensor networks is on systems dedicated for a specific application. Wide variety of circumstances point to the need for sensor network deployments capable of sharing the physical network resources. We introduce the concept of Virtual Sensor Networks (VSN) to Continuing advances in the computational power, radio components, and reduction in the cost of high-performance processing and memory elements has led to the proliferation of portable devices (e.g., intelligent sensors, actuators, and sensory prosthetics) with substantial processing capabilities. Such devices are rapidly permeating a variety of applications domains such as avionics, environmental monitoring, structural sensing, telemedicine, space exploration, and command and control. Perhaps the single largest catalyst has been the emergence of micro-sensor nodes (e.g., Mica motes from Crossbow, Tmote Sky from Moteiv, the MKII nodes from UCLA, SunSpot from Sun, etc.) that integrate computation, networking, and sensing capabilities into a single device [6] . By providing the ability to monitor phenomena in close proximity with multihop wireless communication (enabled by on-board radios) such devices have created the possibility to build reactive systems that have the ability to monitor and react to physical events/phenomena. Given the importance and potential of the impact of sensor technologies, over the past decade, significant progress has been made on techniques to architect and program largescale sensor systems. Important developments include design of light-weight operating systems for sensor devices, powerful programming frameworks that isolate application logic from the complexities of optimizing the computation over sensor networks, techniques for in-network processing that exploit computational resources at the sensors to reduce communication and preserve energy. While substantial progress has been made, current research has primarily considered dedicated sensor networks each supporting one specific application. Such systems are being developed for a vast array of applications ranging from monitoring environmental phenomena, monitoring animals, location and tracking of targets, and emergency rescue [2, 8] . Reasons for using dedicated sensor networks include the limited sensing, processing, and communication abilities of the nodes, severe power constraints, and most of all, the lack of algorithms, protocols, and techniques for International Conference on Information Technology (ITNG'07) 0-7695-2776-0/07 $20.00
The idea of virtual sensor network proposes virtualization of multiple applications running over a single sensor network REF .
Virtual Sensor Networks - A Resource Efficient Approach for Concurrent Applications
Fourth International Conference on Information Technology (ITNG'07)
Fourth International Conference on Information Technology (ITNG'07)
Computer Science