Hybrid Cluster Routing: An Efficient Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Routing is one of the fundamental but challenging issues in mobile ad hoc networks. During the past several years, a large number of routing protocols have been proposed, which can basically be categorized into three different groups including proactive/table-driven, reactive/on-demand, and hybrid. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid routing protocol for large scale mobile ad hoc networks, namely HCR (Hybrid Cluster Routing). Here nodes are organized into a hierarchical structure of multi-hop clusters using a stable distributed clustering algorithm. Each cluster is composed of a clusterhead, several gateway nodes, and other ordinary nodes. The clusterhead is responsible for maintaining local membership and global topology information. In HCR, the acquisition of intra-cluster routing information operates in an on-demand fashion and the maintenance of inter-cluster routing information acts in a proactive way. Simulation results show that HCR conduces better scalability, robustness and adaptability to large scale mobile ad hoc networks compared with some well-known routing protocols, e.g. AODV, DSR, and CBRP.