Geographical awareness hybrid routing protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a geographical awareness routing protocol based on a hybrid routing protocol, the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP), in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). ZRP is created from combining proactive routing protocol and on-demand routing protocol; therefore, it inherits the advantages of both these routing protocols. The long delay time of the on-demand routing protocol and the huge routing overhead of the proactive routing approach are reduced in ZRP. However, ZRP still produces a large amount of redundant routing overhead in the route discovery process, which not only wastes energy but also increases the workload of the network, while limited bandwidth is a challenge for MANETs. To mitigate routing overhead, a geographical awareness approach that is applied to limit the discovered route area in ZRP is proposed and is called the Geographical awareness ZRP (GeoZRP). Simulation results confirm that the proposed algorithm alleviates routing overhead and end-to-end delay with only a slightly decrease in the packet delivery ratio.