The performance of query control schemes for the zone routing protocol

In this paper, we study the performance of route query control mechanisms for the recently proposed Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) for ad-hoc networks. The ZRP proactively maintains routing information for a local neighborhood (routing zone), while reactively acquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. This hybrid routing approach has the potential to be more efficient in the generation of control traffic than traditional routing schemes. However, without proper query control techniques, the ZRP can actually produce more traffic than standard flooding protocols.Our proposed query control schemes exploit the structure of the routing zone to provide enhanced detection (Query Detection (QD1/QD2)), termination (Loop-back Termination (LT), Early Termination (ET)) and prevention (Selective Bordercasting (SBC)) of overlapping queries. We demonstrate how certain combinations of these techniques can be applied to single channel or multiple channel ad-hoc networks to improve both the delay and control traffic performance of the ZRP. Our query control mechanisms allow the ZRP to provide routes to all accessible network nodes with only a fraction of the control traffic generated by purely proactive distance vector and purely reactive flooding schemes, and with a response time as low as 10% of a flooding route query delay.