Eccentricity in Zone Routing Protocol for MANET

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a decentralized network of autonomous mobile nodes, able to communicate with each other over wireless links. Due to the mobility of the nodes, the topology ofthe network changes spontaneously, therefore use of conventional routing tables maintained at fixed points (routers) is not suggested. Such a network may operate in a standalone fashion. There are variousrouting protocols available for MANETs. The most popular ones are DSR, DSDV and ZRP .The zone routing protocol (ZRP) is a hybrid routing protocol that proactively maintains routes within a localregion of the network. ZRP can be configured for a particular network through adjustment of a single parameter, the routing zone radius. In this paper, we address the issue of configuring the ZRP to providethe best performance for a particular network at any time with the concept of eccentricity. The results illustrate the important characteristics of different protocols based on their performance and thus suggest some improvements in the respective protocol. The tools used for the simulation are NS2 which is the main simulator, NAM (Network Animator) and Tracegraph which is used for preparing the graphs from the trace files.