RZRP: A Pure Reactive Zone-based Routing Protocol with Location-Based Predictive Caching Scheme for Wireless Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Hybrid routing strategy is widely utilised in hierarchical routing protocols to balance the control overheads and packet delivery delay in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). In these protocols the area of the concerned MANET is usually divided into zones. As not all of the zones have the equal probability to become an active relay zone, the resources for proactive route information maintenance in each zone are then wasted. Such waste can be significant in large- scale networks. To cope with this deficiency we propose a two- stage pure reactive solution called RZRP. However, the pure reactive implementation can lead to longer delay than proactive or hybrid protocols. To solve this problem, a location-based predictive caching scheme is designed to reduce the latency caused by reactive route discovery. The simulation results have shown that the performance of the RZRP protocol has significantly improved in terms of reducing communication overhead and packet transmission delay.