An Efficient ZHLS Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In this paper, in order to reduce communication overhead in mobile ad hoc networks, we present a zone-based hierarchical link state routing protocol with gateway flooding (ZHLS-GF) in which a new flooding scheme, called gateway flooding is proposed. ZHLS-GF is based on ZHLS, a zone-based hierarchical link state routing protocol. ZHLS is a hierarchical routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks in which a network is divided into non-overlapping zones. All network nodes in ZHLS construct two routing tables, an intrazone routing table and an inter-zone routing table, by flooding NodeLSPs within the zone and ZoneLSPs throughout the network. However, this incurs a large communication overhead in the network. Our proposed flooding scheme floods ZoneLSPs only to the gateway nodes of zones thus reduces the communication overhead significantly. Furthermore in ZHLS-GF, only the gateway nodes store ZoneLSPs and construct interzone routing tables therefore the total storage capacity required in the network is less than ZHLS