Combining virtual and physical structures for self-organized routing

Our recently proposed scalable source routing (SSR) protocol combines source routing in the physical network with Chord-like routing in the virtual ring that is formed by the address space. Thereby, SSR provides self-organized routing in large unstructured networks of resource-limited devices. Its ability to quickly adapt to changes in the network topology makes it suitable not only for sensor-actuator networks but also for mobile ad-hoc networks. Moreover, SSR directly provides the key-based routing semantics, thereby making it an efficient basis for the scalable implementation of self-organizing, fully decentralized applications. In this paper we review SSR's self-organizing features and demonstrate how the combination of virtual and physical structures leads to emergence of stability and efficiency. In particular, we focus on SSR's resistance against node churn. Following the principle of combining virtual and physical structures, we propose an extension that stabilizes SSR in face of heavy node churn. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of this extension.