Virtual Cord Protocol (VCP): A flexible DHT-like routing service for sensor networks

Efficient data management techniques are needed in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to counteract issues related to limited resources, e.g. energy, memory, bandwidth, as well as limited connectivity. Self-organizing and cooperative algorithms are thought to be the optimal solution to overcome these limitations. On an abstract level, structured peer-to-peer protocols provide O(1) complexity for storing and retrieving data in the network. However, they rely on underlayer routing techniques. In this paper, we present the virtual cord protocol (VCP), a virtual relative position based efficient routing protocol that also provides means for data management, e.g. insert, get, and delete, as known from typical distributed hash table (DHT) services. The key contributions of this protocol are independence of real location information by relying on relative positions of neighboring nodes, short virtual paths because successors and predecessors are in their vicinity, and high scalability because only information about direct neighbors is needed for routing. Furthermore, VCP inherently prevents dead-ends and it is easy to be implemented.