Trust-Aware Virtual Network Embedding in Wireless Sensor Networks

Network virtualization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enables the utilization of their shared sensing capabilities. Efficient assignment of WSN resources to maximize the infrastructure provider’s revenue can be achieved by virtual network embedding (VNE) while considering quality of information (QoI) (as the accuracy of sensing), quality of service (QoS) (as the reliability), and wireless interference handling constraints. Improving the acceptance ratio of VNE is essential because the more the virtual networks can be mapped onto the substrate network, the more revenue they will generate for the infrastructure provider. However, the shared and complex nature of VNE exposes the WSNs to security risks. This article develops a novel offline trust-aware virtual WSN (TA-VWSN) algorithm to maximize the virtual networks acceptance rate while minimizing the cost. This algorithm improves the QoI, QoS, and security by adding required trust level constraints to virtual nodes and links and trust level constraints to the substrate counterparts. Our algorithm embeds virtual nodes and links on substrate nodes and links with the required trust levels. The additional constraints increase the complexity of computation required to achieve an optimal solution. However, our TA-VWSN algorithm achieves a high-quality suboptimal solution in a short duration, enabling us to investigate the tradeoff between solution quality and search time. Our algorithm is also evaluated in large-scale network scenarios to verify all enforced limitations by the WSN substrate. While adding security constraints limits the acceptance ratio, the simulation results demonstrate its superiority in terms of average network throughput, measurement error efficiency, and processing time when the trust attributes are assigned, making the VNE algorithm more practical.