Shared Sensor Networks Fundamentals, Challenges, Opportunities, Virtualization Techniques, Comparative Analysis, Novel Architecture and Taxonomy

The rabid growth of today’s technological world has led us to connecting every electronic device worldwide together, which guides us towards the Internet of Things (IoT). Gathering the produced information based on a very tiny sensing devices under the umbrella of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The nature of these networks suffers from missing sharing among them in both hardware and software, which causes redundancy and more budget to be used. Thus, the appearance of Shared Sensor Networks (SSNs) provides a real modern revolution in it. Where it targets making a real change in its nature from domain specific networks to concurrent running domain networks. That happens by merging it with the technology of virtualization that enables the sharing feature over different levels of its hardware and software to provide the optimal utilization of the deployed infrastructure with a reduced cost. This article is concerned with surveying the idea of SSNs, the difference between it and the traditional WSNs, the requirements for its construction, challenges facing it, and the opportunities that are provided by it, then describing our proposed architectures. As a result of using virtualization technology as a basic block in building SSNs, using different types of virtualization will produce different types of SSNs that will give different usages to it. This article proposes a novel approach of taxonomy for SSNs that is based on the used virtualization techniques, and it describes the needs and usages of each one. It presents a wide array of previously proposed solutions comparing them to each other and a brief description of the issues addressed by each category of that taxonomy. Additionally, the shared sensor architecture and shared network architecture were depicted. Finally, some of its applications in some daily life fields are listed.