Zone Disjoint Multipath Routing Protocol

An ad-hoc network is the co-operative engagement of a collection of mobile nodes without the required intervention of any centralised access point or existing infrastructure. Several routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) have been proposed. Most of the existing routing protocols are single path routing protocols which establish a single routing path between the source and destination nodes. This results in rapid depletion of battery power of the nodes that comprise the path between the source and destination nodes. This reduces the lifetime of the network. The proposed protocol overcomes these drawbacks by following a hybrid approach to routing of data packets and establishing multiple zone disjoint paths between the source and destination zones. The proposed protocol is based on the Zone based Hierarchical Link State Routing Protocol (ZHLS). The proposed work eliminates the need for the global broadcasting of zone LSP's and the need for the interzone routing tables used in ZHLS. The proposed protocol establishes multiple zone disjoint paths between the source and destination zones. The packets are encrypted by making use of a symmetric cryptosystem. The simulation results show that the proposed work outperforms the existing ZHLS and provides a flexible, efficient and effective approach for routing packets in mobile ad-hoc networks. General Terms MANETs, Zone Routing Protocols, Multipath Routing.