Distance aware zone routing protocol for less delay transmission and efficient bandwidth utilization

Abstract

Zone Routing protocol (ZRP) combines the best features of both proactive and reactive MANET routing protocol and hence comes under the category of MANET hybrid routing protocol. ZRP is based on the concept of zones where zone is defined based on the number of hops, the actual physical distance is not considered. The zone size is directly propositional to the distance between the sender and border nodes, so if the distance increases, the radio coverage of the sender node will not be able to reach the border nodes in the zone, so that the sender node will need to increase the number of broadcasts to find the border nodes in the zone, which will obviously increase the bandwidth utilization. Since effective utilization of bandwidth is one of the major issues faced by MANET routing protocols the paper proposes a modification for ZRP by considering physical distance of the nodes also as a factor in determining the Zone radius for the effective utilization of the bandwidth and an easy cost effective way to determine the distance between the nodes using triangulation. Moreover considering the actual distance leads to the selection of shortest path and thus decreases the delay in packet delivery. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.