Evaluation of the Ad-Hoc Connectivity with the Zone Routing Protocols

In this paper, we evaluate the novel routing protocol for a special class of ad-hoc networks, termed by us the Reconfigurable Wireless Networks (RWNs). The main features of the RWNs are: the increased mobility of the network nodes, the large number of nodes, and the large network span. We argue that the current routing protocols do not provide a satisfactory solution for routing in this type of an environment. We propose a scheme, coined the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP), which dynamically adjusts itself to the operational conditions by sizing a single network parameter the Zone Radius. More specifically, the ZRP reduces the cost of frequent updates of the constantly changing network topology by limiting the scope of the updates to the immediate neighborhood of the change – the Zone Radius. We study the performance of the scheme, evaluating the average number of control messages required to discover a route within the network. Furthermore, we compare the scheme’s performance, on one hand, with reactive flooding-based schemes, and, on the other hand, with proactive distance-vector schemes.