P2P-based routing and data management using the virtual cord protocol (VCP)

We present Virtual Cord Protocol (VCP), a virtual relative position based routing protocol for sensor networks that also provides methods for data management as known from standard DHT services. Self-organizing and cooperative algorithms are thought to be the optimal solution to overcome the inherent resource limitations in sensor networks. On an abstract level, DHT techniques offer O(1) complexity data lookup. Unfortunately, they usually rely on underlayer routing techniques. The key contributions of VCP are the independence of real location information by relying on relative positions of neighboring nodes, successors and predecessors in the cord are always in their vicinity, and the high scalability because only information about direct neighbors are needed for routing. Furthermore, VCP inherently prevents dead-ends and it is easy to be implemented.