An efficient ZHLS routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

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 interzone 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.