Robust Route Establishment in High-Mobility MANETs

In a high-mobility MANET, the fast changes of topology increases the complexity of routing. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol, namely, Zone-Based Stable Routing (ZBSR) protocol, where the network area is divided into fixed none-overlapping square zones. There is a zone-head in each zone that acts as a router in the network and maintains information of its member nodes. A Path is a collection of ID numbers, which represent the specific zones the path traverses. We define new performance parameters the mobility of a node as the number of zones a node traverses during a fixed time unit, and the path stability parameter as values related to both the mobility of nodes a path includes and the density of the zones the path covers. In this case, we select the most stable path for routing packets. Simulation results show that the probability of broken links becomes very low, which in turn greatly increases the delivery rate of the network. We show that ZBSR outperforms existing location-based routing protocols and adapts better to high-mobility MANETs.