  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.
