ZHRP-DCSEI, a Novel Hybrid Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks to Optimize Energy Using Dynamic Cuckoo Search Algorithm

Abstract

In the wireless network advancement, Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) has been one of the developing areas of research. MANET is a group of wireless mobile nodes, which dynamically interchange information by modeling a short-term network without any framework. In MANET, routing is a highly challenging problem. Routing refers to discovering a path between the source (transmitter) and the destination (recipient) to forward the data packets. In a dynamic environment like MANET, another challenging issue is to prolong the network lifetime by optimizing the energy to avoid broken links. An improved version of hybrid Zone based Hierarchical Routing Protocol (ZHRP) based on Dynamic Cuckoo Search (DCS) algorithm has been proposed to optimize the path selection process and energy utilization. Initially, the DCS algorithm has been applied to zone based hierarchical routing protocol to discover and sustain the best routes for each node. Then, the stability of the wireless link is evaluated using this meta-heuristic technique. In the DCS algorithm, to maintain the balance between the global and the local random walks, a dynamic switching parameter has been applied. Different versions of dynamic switching parameters in the cuckoo search algorithm such as linear decreasing, linear increasing, exponential increasing, and power increasing are implemented to enhance the performance of the routing process in MANETs. The simulation results show that the proposed dynamic cuckoo search based hybrid routing technique has comparatively improved the performance of zone based hierarchical routing in terms of energy consumption, average delay, packet delivery rate, and throughput. Finally, the simulation results indicate that the DCS algorithm with a switching parameter, which increases exponentially, outperforms the variants of the DCS algorithm.