Cayley: A Robust Overlay with Simple Routing and Small-World Features for Wireless Sensor Networks

Efficient data processing techniques are needed in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to handle 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. In this paper, we present the Virtual Cayley Protocol, a virtual relative position based efficient routing protocol that also provides means for data operation, 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 direct neighbors are in their vicinity, and high scalability because only information about direct neighbors is needed for routing. Furthermore, Cayley inherently prevents dead-ends and it is easy to be implemented. Cayley is a generalization of the Virtual Cord Protocol (VCP) and has more robust and efficient routing. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [CEIS 2011]