Dynamic hybrid routing (DHR) in mobile ad hoc networks

The route discovery and maintenance processes in wireless mobile networks are very expensive tasks due to the mobility of the host. Route discovery requires a considerable amount of resources and therefore it is wise to utilize the effort already invested in existing paths. This paper proposes a dynamic hybrid routing (DHR) protocol in ad hoc networks, which constructs paths only upon demand by taking attributes from both proactive and reactive algorithms. The goal of DHR is to re-use, whenever possible, portions of several existing paths when establishing a new path. The reusability is accomplished by using dynamic proactive zones (PZs), through which nearby existing path information is disseminated. By utilizing the information stored in PZs, considerable savings (in time and traffic) can be achieved over other on-demand routing algorithms that use flooding. In other route-finding algorithms, proactive zones are formed throughout the network and remain unchanged, whereas in DHR, routes are created and destroyed dynamically around the existing paths. Even though DHR may not find the shortest path between source and destination, it does reduce the amount of traffic needed to find a path and therefore increases the available bandwidth for data transfer.