iDVSP: Intelligent Dynamic Virtual Sensor Provisioning in Sensor-Cloud Infrastructure

In sensor-cloud framework, the concept of virtual sensor provisioning is applied to serve the end- users, who requests sensing information from the deployed sensor network. In a multi-hop sensor- cloud framework, the information collection from the physical sensors to the virtual sensor needs to activate additional nodes for information forwarding to the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). The existing works mainly consider the activation of these nodes from the same sensor owner (SO) and exhibit higher energy consumption. Although, in a sensor-cloud framework, multiple SOs co-exist naturally, and consequently, the service area of these SOs overlap. In this paper, contrasting to the existing works, we argue that the collaboration between the CSP and SOs can improve dynamic virtual sensor provisioning. We propose a scheme named Intelligent Dynamic Virtual Sensor Provisioning (iDVSP) to enable optimal selection of nodes in a multi-hop path with different SOs. We employ multi-unit single-item combinatorial reverse auction to model the interaction between the CSP and SOs. The auction based scheme facilitates the CSP to dynamically negotiate with the SOs, and ensure cost-effective node selection for virtual sensor provisioning. Simulation based results indicate that the proposed scheme is 46.51% energy-efficient compared to existing literature. Furthermore, we observe that the proposed scheme employ fair policy for node selection from different SOs. Therefore, we can argue that the proposed scheme enforces cooperation between the SOs in the sensor-cloud framework.