Many researchers are devoting attention to the so-called “Internet of Things” (IoT), and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are regarded as a critical technology for realizing the communication infrastructure of the future, including the IoT. Against this background, virtualization is a crucial technique for the integration of multiple WSNs. Designing virtualized WSNs for actual environments will require further detailed studies. Within the IoT environment, physical networks can undergo dynamic change, and so, many problems exist that could prevent applications from running without interruption when using the existing approaches. In this paper, we show an overall architecture that is suitable for constructing and running virtual wireless sensor network (VWSN) services within a VWSN topology. Our approach provides users with a reliable VWSN network by assigning redundant resources according to each user’s demand and providing a recovery method to incorporate environmental changes. We tested this approach by simulation experiment, with the results showing that the VWSN network is reliable in many cases, although physical deployment of sensor nodes and the modular structure of the VWSN will be quite important to the stability of services within the VWSN topology.

In most applications, wireless sensor networks are supposed to operate in an unattended manner for a long period after sensor nodes’ deployment. However, in such networks, sensor nodes frequently become faulty and unreliable because of the harsh environment of the observed area. Therefore, protocols used in wireless sensor networks must be designed to be robust. Moreover, because the battery capacity of a node is limited, energy savings are crucial in wireless sensor networks. To meet the requirements of future diverse wireless sensor networks, a sophisticated any-to-any routing protocol is thus required. As well as meeting the typical demands of wireless sensor networks, an any-to-any routing protocol needs to achieve low energy consumption, high scalability, robustness, and reliability. In this paper, we realize a potential-based any-to-any routing protocol (PBAR) by merging potential-based upstream and downstream routing. In PBAR, sensor nodes can send data to a certain sensor node by routing the data via a sink node. In simulation experiments, we show that, given a suitable node density, PBAR attains a data delivery ratio greater than 99.7%. We also show that the data delivery ratio recovers immediately after failure of 30% of sensor nodes or failure of a sink node.

In the context of Internet of Things, virtualization of wireless sensor networks is a crucial technology for sharing sensors as infrastructure. In our previous work, we proposed a brain-inspired method for constructing a robust and adaptive virtual wireless sensor network topology and showed that the method of constructing links between modules has crucial effect on robustness and adaptivity of the constructed virtual wireless sensor network topology. However, the best way of constructing a robust and adaptive virtual wireless sensor network topology is still unclear. Therefore, in this article, we use an analytical approach and propose a method for clarifying robustness of a topology according to the method of constructing links between modules. We add a new tool to a binary-dynamics model which is an analytical method for investigating percolation dynamics on a modular network. Evaluation by simulation showed that graphs in which the number of nodes selected as endpoint nodes of inter-module links and the degrees of the endpoint nodes before the link addition are large have robust connectivity in terms of the point of fragmentation of the network into modules when we fix the degree of the endpoint nodes after the link addition. After the point, the internal structure of modules may matter more. We additionally investigate an applicable range of our proposed method.