PSO‐IZRP: New enhanced zone routing protocol based on PSO independent zone radius estimation

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years, a variety of new routing protocols for MANETs have been developed. Zone routing protocol is one of them, which is a hybrid routing protocol that combines the best futures of proactive and reactive approaches. The proactive part of the protocol maintains routing information for a local neighborhood, known as routing zone, while the reactive part acquire routes to destinations beyond this routing zone. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for zone radius determination based on particles swarm optimization. The use of PSO allows ZRP protocol to dynamically adjust itself to the environments conditions by sizing each node's routing zone. The proposed algorithm as well as the new ZRP protocol are implemented under NS‐2 simulator and tested using different scenario simulating protocol environment changes. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm to reduce the control traffic overhead and the average end‐2‐end delay and to increase the packet delivery ratio resulting to an improvement of the network quality of service. Besides the use of particle swarm optimization to tune the zone routing protocol radius, the contribution consists of enhancing the performance of the zone routing protocol to improve the network quality of service with low control traffic overhead, low end‐to‐end delay, and high packet delivery ratio.