Performance Analysis of ZHLS-GF Routing Protocol for MANETs through Simulations

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of communication devices or nodes that wish to communicate without any fixed infrastructure and predetermined organization of available links. The nodes in MANET themselves are responsible for dynamically discovering other nodes to communicate. Many routing protocols have been developed for MANETs over the past few years. This paper will help us in analyzing performance of ZHLS-GF routing protocol i.e. Zone-Based Hierarchical Link State Routing Protocol with Gateway Flooding (ZHLS-GF) in which a new flooding scheme, called Gateway Flooding was used. ZHLS-GF is based on ZHLS, a Zone-Based Hierarchical Link State Routing Protocol. ZHLS is a hierarchical protocol; the network is divided into non-overlapping zones. Each node only knows the node connectivity within its zone and the zone connectivity of the whole network. The zone level topological information is distributed to all nodes. All network nodes in ZHLS construct two routing tables, an intrazone routing table and an interzone routing table, by flooding NodeLSPs within the zone and ZoneLSPs throughout the network. This incurs a large communication overhead in the network.

ZHLS-GF floods ZoneLSPs only to the gateway nodes of zones thus reduce the communication overhead significantly. Furthermore in ZHLS-GF, only the gateway nodes store ZoneLSPs and construct interzone routing tables therefore the total storage capacity required in the network is less than ZHLS. Different performance aspects were investigated in this project including; packet delivery ratio, power consumption no. of hops and average end-to-end delay. A test bed has been developed for ZHLS routing protocol and the performance parameters of ZHLS-GF and ZHLS are compared. Power consumption parameter is discussed for power that is for simulation purpose. This test bed confirms that which protocol has the more power consumption. It also confirms that how simulation in ZHLS and ZHLS-GF differs. This thesis uses Windows operating system based platform and vb.net language to develop the test bed and to compare two hierarchical routing protocols.