A two-zone hybrid routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Recently, an elegant routing protocol, the zone routing protocol (ZRP), was proposed to provide a hybrid routing framework that is locally proactive and globally reactive, with the goal of minimizing the sum of the proactive and reactive control overhead. The key idea of ZRP is that each node proactively advertises its link state over a fixed number of hops, called the zone radius. These local advertisements provide each node with an updated view of its routing zone - the collection of all nodes and links that are reachable within the zone radius. The nodes on the boundary of the routing zone are called peripheral nodes and play an important role in the reactive zone-based route discovery. The main contribution of this work is to propose a novel hybrid routing protocol - the two-zone routing protocol (TZRP) - as a nontrivial extension of ZRP. In contrast with the original ZRP where a single zone serves a dual purpose, TZRP aims to decouple the protocol´s ability to adapt to traffic characteristics from its ability to adapt to mobility. In support of this goal, in TZRP each node maintains two zones: a crisp zone and a fuzzy zone. By adjusting the sizes of these two zones independently, a lower total routing control overhead can be achieved. Extensive simulation results show that TZRP is a general MANET routing framework that can balance the trade offs between various routing control overheads more effectively than ZRP in a wide range of network conditions.