FR-SLR, forwarder reduction in SLR routing protocol through zone splitting

Current routing protocols are inefficient in dense networks, where nodes have numerous neighbors. An example of a protocol is SLR, which divides the network into zones, with all nodes in a zone sharing the same coordinate. As such, all nodes in a zone participate together in the routing process, leading to the useless consumption of resources. For such networks, we propose FR-SLR, a routing protocol based on SLR, aiming to reduce the number of forwarders in each zone by dividing the nodes into groups and making only one group of nodes forward the packet in each zone. FR-SLR uses an id assignment mechanism to split the nodes in a zone into several groups so that the routing is done per group instead of per zone, thus reducing the number of nodes involved in routing. Simulations on an ultra-dense nanonetwork show the effectiveness of the proposed routing protocol in reducing the number of traffic forwarders.