Reactive Virtual Position-Based Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Virtual position-based routing protocols have many attractive characteristics for wireless sensor networks. Typically, such protocols use a proactive scheme for updating routing tables. Because sensor networks can have very low data rate, sending periodic beacons to update routing tables can be very expensive. Instead, reactive approaches might be more appropriate in such scenarios. MANET-inspired reactive routing protocols do not scale well because of the effort in the order of O(n) for each routing information update. In this paper, we present Reactive Virtual Cord Protocol (RVCP), a data-centric reactive virtual position based routing protocol for use in sensor networks. Route discovery is directed towards the destination and hence there is no need to flood the entire network to discover a route. Our approach is based on Virtual Cord Protocol (VCP), an efficient, virtual relative position based routing protocol that also provides support for data management as known from typical Distributed Hash Table (DHT) services. To minimize the end-to-end delay and energy consumption, we used adaptive techniques for the development of RVCP.