IVYA-ZRP: An Enhanced Zone Routing Protocol with Zone Radius Optimization for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies, mobile devices, and distributed systems, the scale and dynamics of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are increasing, which results in increasingly stringent requirements for routing protocols. The Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP), as a hybrid routing protocol that combines the advantages of proactive and reactive routing, has been a center of current research. However, the traditional ZRP exhibits poor routing performance in highly mobile large-scale networks since it uses a fixed zone radius for all nodes. To solve the above problem, this paper proposes an improved protocol based on the Ivy algorithm (IVYA). The proposed framework employs offline optimization with a weighted fitness function based on quality of service (QoS) to determine the optimal zone radius configuration. The optimized configuration is subsequently deployed within the distributed ZRP. Using the NS-2 simulation platform, the proposed protocol was evaluated under four types of scenarios, including network scale, mobility speed, traffic rate, and pause time. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to the traditional ZRP, the protocol proposed in this paper exhibits superior performance across all evaluation metrics.