A framework for ontology provisioning in Virtualized Wireless Sensor Networks

Virtualization in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) allows an efficient resource usage through the sharing of the same WSN physical infrastructure by multiple applications. Semantic applications are gaining more and more momentum. However, provisioning them in Virtualized WSNs (vWSNs) remains a big challenge; the data collected by the virtual sensors needs to be annotated in-network and for this annotation, an ontology needs to be provisioned, i.e. developed, deployed and managed. This paper proposes a framework for ontology provisioning in vWSNs. The framework comprises of an ontology provisioning center, an ontology enabled vWSN and an ontology provisioning protocol that enables the interactions between the provisioning center and the ontology enabled vWSN. To the best of our knowledge this is the first effort to provide such support in vWSNs. We have built a prototype to evaluate the performance of the framework and also present simulation results of the ontology provisioning protocol.