Zone-based routing protocol for high-mobility MANET

In high-mobility MANET, the fast change of topology increases the complexity of routing. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol, namely, zone-based routing (ZBR) protocol, where the network area is divided into fixed nonoverlapping square zones. There is a zone-head in each zone that acts as a router in the network and maintains information of its member nodes. A path is a collection of ID numbers, which represent the specific zones the path traverses. We define new parameters-the mobility of a node to be the number of zones a node traverses during a fixed time unit, and the path stability parameter as a value related to both the mobility of nodes a path includes and the density of the zones the path covers. In this case, we select the most stable path for routing packets. Simulation results show that the probability of broken links becomes very low, which in turn greatly increases the delivery rate of the network. We show that ZBR outperforms existing location-based routing protocols and adapts better to high-mobility MANET.