On the performance of a routing protocol for the reconfigurable wireless network

Reconfigurable wireless networks (RWNs) are a special class of ad-hoc networks that are characterized by: large geographical coverage, wide range of nodal mobility, and large nodal density. Recently, a new routing protocol for this type of networks was proposed and coined the zone routing protocol (ZRP). The main feature of the ZRP protocol is its dynamic behavior-the operation of the scheme is governed by a single parameter, the zone radius, which adjusts the scheme´s behavior from purely reactive to proactive routing. We study the performance of the scheme, evaluating the average number of control messages required to discover a route within the network. Our results show that by properly seizing the zone radius, the routing overhead can be lower (sometimes much lower) than the overhead of both reactive and proactive schemes