HGRP: Hybrid Grid Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous Hierarchical Wireless Networks

With the fast growth of various mobile terminals, the heterogeneous terminals that have different capabilities and resources are required and mixed in the deployment. Using this feature, we can improve the routing protocol. The available routing protocols for mobile Ad Hoc networks are designed mainly for homogeneous wireless networks. The heterogeneous wireless networks are now needed urgently in many important applications. However, rare dedicated routing protocols are available yet for mixed deployment scenarios for heterogeneous nodes. In this paper, such a protocol, namely Hybrid Grid Routing Protocol (HGRP), is proposed. The main idea of HGRP is to properly divide the network deployment area into grids according to the location, each of which contains one backbone routing node and some ordinary nodes. The key design issues of this new protocol, including grid division, local routing within one grid, and global routing among grids, will be introduced. Extensive ns-2 based simulation results indicate that in comparison with adopting AODV and ZRP protocols directly for routing in a heterogeneous wireless networks, applying the new HGRP protocol can offer us the advantages of a lower routing cost and lower energy consumption.