Exploring the economical benefits of virtualized wireless sensor networks

Encouraged by the success of network vir-tualization in enterprise networks, wireless sensor network (WSN) virtualization has been receiving increasing attention. WSN virtualization is seen as offering economic benefits through resource sharing. But the actual gain is not clear and its cost-benefit ratio has not been thoroughly analyzed. While the discussion about the economic benefits of network virtualization is often reduced to two key components, namely CAPEX and OPEX, the effect of radio interference in wireless multi-hop networks such as WSN has not been considered. In this paper, we analyze the influencing factors that contribute to the cost of providing a virtual WSN over a shared physical substrate. We model the CAPEX and OPEX associated with Virtualized WSNs (VWSNs) and introduce an additional element, which we call INEX, into our cost function which captures the future impact (i.e. the "actual cost") of interference. INEX results in a loss of income due to increased VN request rejection rates. Using this model we conduct extensive simulations that allow us to compare the cost difference between renting shared WSN resources and deploying a standalone network. The results indicate that shared WSNs result in higher cost when there is only one sink.