Advantages of virtual addressing for efficient and failure tolerant routing in sensor networks

We study the capabilities of virtual addressing schemes for efficient and failure tolerant routing in sensor networks. In particular, we present the virtual cord protocol (VCP) that uses techniques known from peer-to-peer networks, i.e. distributed hash tables (DHTs) are used to associate data items in sensor networks with particular node addresses. The addresses of nodes are dynamically maintained by the protocol to form a virtual cord. VCP uses two mechanisms for finding paths to nodes and associated data items: First, it relies on the virtual cord that always points towards the destination. Furthermore, locally available neighborhood information is exploited for greedy routing. Our simulation results show that VCP is able to find paths close to the possible shortest path with very low overhead. The routing performance of VCP, which clearly outperforms other ad hoc routing protocols such as Dynamic MANET On Demand (DYMO), is similar to other virtual addressing schemes, e.g. Virtual Ring Routing (VRR). However, we improved VCP to handle frequent node failures in an optimized way. The results presented in this paper outline the capabilities of VCP to handle such cases.