Adapting zone routing protocol for heterogeneous scenarios in ad hoc networks

Abstract

In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols for mobile ad hoc wireless NETworks (MANETs) have been developed. Performance evaluation and comparison of many of these routing protocols have been done using detailed simulation models. Zone routing protocol (ZRP) is one of these routing protocols, which is a hybrid routing protocol that proactively maintains routing information for a local neighborhood (routing zone), while reactively acquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. The studies on ZRP have assumed homogeneous scenarios where all mobile nodes are statistically identical, lacking the studies on heterogeneous scenarios where mobile nodes behave differently in the same network. We study the performance of ZRP in such scenarios. We propose an efficient scheme for ZRP to adapt to the heterogeneous mobility scenario and study its performance for different mobility scenarios, network loads and network sizes