An Improvement in Zone Routing Protocol Using Bloom Filter

A mobile ad hoc Network (MANET) is a self-organizing and self-configurable wireless network of mobile nodes, which move arbitrarily without a pre-existing infrastructure. Routing is a critical issue in MANETs. One well-known protocol for ad hoc networks is the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP). However, because ZRP sends many useless control packets, the network load increases and the network performance decreases. This paper examines a novel routing protocol that uses Bloom filters and the topology information of neighbor nodes to improve ZRP. A Bloom filter is often used as a content discovery method. In this case, the content ID is hashed to one value. In our proposed protocol, the node ID is hashed to one value, and a Bloom filter is generated from the ID values in a zone. The generated Bloom filter is propagated across a tree structure over a MANET. The tree is constructed by the peripheral nodes of the IntErzone Routing Protocol (IERP) of ZRP. The Bloom Filter sent from a peripheral node is managed as node information of the direction of the peripheral node. The number of RouteQuery packets of IERP can be reduced by using the managed Bloom filter. We compare the performance of the proposed routing protocol with the bordercast of IERP and show the feasibility of the proposed method as a routing protocol for MANETs.