HYBRID ROUTING PROTOCOLS FOR AD HOC WIRELESS NETWORKS

An ad hoc wireless network has a dynamic nature that leads to constant changes in its network topology.As a consequence, the routing problem becomes more complex and challengeable, and it probably is themost addressed and studied problem in ad hoc networks. Based on the routing information updatemechanism Ad hoc wireless networks routing protocols are classified into Proactive, Reactive and HybridRouting Protocols. Out of these, Hybrid Routing Protocol combines the best futures of the first twocategories. The Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is one of the hybrid routing protocols in which everynetwork node proactively maintaining routing information about its routing zone, while reactivelyacquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. In this paper, we proposed the Independent ZoneRouting Protocol (IZRP) an enhancement of the Zone Routing Protocol which allows adaptive anddistributed configuration for the optimal size of each node’s routing zone, on per-node basis. Wedemonstrate the performance of IZRP with various performance metrics. Furthermore, we compared theperformance of IZRP and ZRP by considering performance metrics Packet Delivery Fraction, NormalizedRouting Overhead and End-to-End Delay.