SensOrch: QoS-Aware Resource Orchestration for Provisioning Sensors-as-a-Service

In this work, we address the problem of efficient utilization of resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes for provisioning Sensors-as-a-Service (Se-aaS) with high quality. In sensor-cloud, the sensor-owners provide their respective sensor nodes to the sensor-cloud service provider (SCSP) on rent. The SCSP utilizes these nodes to create virtual sensors and provisions them as Se-aaS for serving their WSN-dependent applications of the end-users and earns revenue in exchange. To ascertain high quality-of-service (QoS) of Se-aaS while simultaneously ensuring profits for itself and the sensor-owners, the SCSP needs to optimally allocate physical sensor nodes to serve the virtual sensors, while considering their limited capacity and the fair distribution of service load among different sensor-owners. Although a few existing works focused on resource allocation problem in sensor-cloud, none of them considered the possibility of sharing the same physical sensor node among multiple virtual sensors. Hence, in this work, we propose a resource orchestration scheme for sensor-cloud, named SensOrch, which is based on coalition formation game with transferable utility. Using SensOrch, the SCSP ensures the optimal allocation of sensor nodes to form virtual sensors while maintaining high QoS and profitability of Se-aaS. Through simulations, we yield that, using SensOrch, the network lifetime increases by 25.31 – 59.6% along with a simultaneous increase in the profit of the SCSP by 23.64 – 29.49%, compared to the existing schemes. Additionally, SensOrch ensures fair revenue distribution among the sensor-owners.