An Effective Scheme for Detecting Articulation Points in Zone Routing Protocol

Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is a typical hybrid routing protocol used in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Hybrid routing protocols are especially suitable for dynamic environments because they combine the best features of proactive and reactive routing protocols. The Gossip-based Zone Routing Protocol (GZRP) uses a gossip scheme, in which the node forwards a packet to some nodes instead of all nodes to further reduce the control overhead. However, GZRP does not perform well when the network includes articulation points since packets will be lost if an articulation node happens not to forward the packet or nodes happen not to forward packets to the articulation point. To raise the packet delivery ratio, the gossip probability of articulation points must be set to 1 and the packets to be forwarded must be sent to the articulation points in peripheral nodes. Accordingly, how to identify articulation nodes in the network becomes a critical issue. This paper proposes an effective scheme, called articulation point detection (APD), to find the articulation points. Simulation results show that the proposed APD-GZRP (GZRP with articulation point detection) can improve the packet delivery ratio and reduce both the control overhead and power consumption.