RETRACTED ARTICLE: A zone routing protocol incorporated with sleep scheduling for MANETs

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are dynamic in nature, and this poses inefficient routing challenges. In the traditional zone routing protocol (ZRP), since there is inter-zone routing, the border nodes will be overloaded. Further, there is also high energy consumption due to idle listening, retransmission, overhearing and control packets generation. The paper proposes a ZRP incorporated with sleep scheduling for MANETs. Since this ZRP is energy-efficient and load-balanced, it is referred to as energy-efficient and load-balanced ZRP. In this approach, the nodes are grouped into zones, and each zone elects a zone leader (ZL) on the basis of its residual energy, degree of connectivity, link quality, and distance to the border nodes. To ensure load balancing, the ZL chooses multiple paths from border nodes to the destination, and distributes the traffic along these paths. An adaptive sleep duty cycling mechanism is also implemented. This is to save the power on border nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol reduces energy consumption, besides enhancing the throughput and packet delivery ratio.