ABSTRACT

The Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is a hybrid routing protocol for MANET which combines the advantages of the proactive and reactive approaches by maintaining an up-to-date topological map of a zone centered on each node. Routes within a routing zone are usually maintained by a table driven proactive routing approach whereas for destinations outside the routing zone, ZRP employs a Reactive Routing mechanism thus making an attempt to utilize both the features of proactive as well as reactive routing policy. In this work, a simulation based study has been carried out to explore the behavior of Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) under an environment where the density of the nodes in the network and more importantly the radius of the routing zone vary considerably. This will throw an insight on the operation of the protocol and understand its sensitivity on varying and fast changing network topology which is most common in any form of wireless networks.