Hybrid Cluster Routing: An Efficient Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

-Routing is one of the fundamental but challenging issues in mobile ad hoc networks. During the past several years, a large number of routing protocols have been proposed, which can basically be categorized into three different groups including proactive/table-driven, reactive/on-demand, and hybrid. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid routing protocol for large scale mobile ad hoc networks, namely HCR (Hybrid Cluster Routing). Here nodes are organized into a hierarchical structure of multi-hop clusters using a stable distributed clustering algorithm. Each cluster is composed of a clusterhead, several gateway nodes, and other ordinary nodes. The clusterhead is responsible for maintaining local membership and global topology information. In HCR, the acquisition of intra-cluster routing information operates in an on-demand fashion and the maintenance of inter-cluster routing information acts in a proactive way. Simulation results show that HCR conduces better scalability, robustness and adaptability to large scale mobile ad hoc networks compared with some well-known routing protocols, e.g. AODV, DSR, and CBRP.

Bringing SDN to the mobile edge

“…Another method which has been shown to be quite effective in improving scalability and robustness of distributed routing protocols is clustering [18], [19]. The main idea here is to allow nodes with close proximity to work together as a cluster and determine routes independently from other nodes.…”

Analysis of Hybrid Routing Protocols ZRP, HCR and ANTHOCNET: A Review

“…Most of the cluster based routing protocols use proactive approaches within the cluster and reactive approach outside the cluster [10]. However this type of routing incurs overhead and delay.…”

“…It is initiated by a node when it has some packets to send to the destination, which is located inside a cluster. When a node receives a route request (RREQ), it will verify whether it can reply to the RREQ [10]. The following two cases are possible: the node is the requested node or gateway; and an intermediate node has a valid route in its local routing table.…”

“…On the other hand, intra-cluster routing is on the lower level, which means a packet is routed within a cluster node by node. When a source node has data packets to send to some destination it check its routing table, if there is no data available to the destination, then node perform route discovery procedure [10]. The route discovery consists of inter-cluster route discovery and intra-cluster route discovery.…”

“…Query control mechanism allow ZRP to provide routes to all accessible nodes, with less control traffic than purely proactive and purely reactive routing and with less delay than conventional flood searching. Xiaoguang Niu et.al [10] have proposed a novel hybrid routing protocol for large scale mobile ad hoc networks namely Hybrid Custer Routing Protocol (HCR). In this nodes are organised into a hierarchical structure of multi-hop cluster.…”