Performance Investigation of Hybrid Bio-Inspired Zone Routing Protocol Over Proactive and Reactive Routing Protocols

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) require optimal routing mechanisms for routing in highly dynamic environments. The most dynamic environment is subject to dynamic changes and a lack of central coordination. The combination of bio-inspired algorithms with reactive approaches is a suitable choice to deal with the dynamic characteristics of VANETs. In this regard, hybrid bio-inspired zone routing protocol (HyBIZRP) proposes to find the optimal shortest path with a limited number of vehicles for routing messages. In HyBIZRP, phase 1 follows a modified proactive mode and phase 2 follows an enhanced reactive mode for routing. Using modified Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) in HyBIZRP provides optimal routing with low overhead and delay. The proposed HyBIZRP and existing works are simulated in Network Simulator (NS 2). Important metrics such as throughput, packet delivery ratio (PDR), overhead (OH), and end-to-end delay (EED) were used to compare the proposed HyBIZRP with proactive enhanced bio-inspired routing algorithm (EBIRA), reactive improved distance-based Ant Colony Optimization Routing (IDBACOR), and Enhanced Hybrid Ant Colony Optimization Routing Protocol (EHACORP). The simulation outputs show that the proposed HyBIZRP is superior in all aspects compared to EBIRA, IDBACOR, and EHACORP.