Zone Routing Protocol is a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) protocol. In general, networks can be categorized in wired, wireless, and ad hoc. The difference between MANET and wired or wireless is that MANET does not need infrastructure to form a network. MANET uses its node as a medium to the other nodes to establish connection. Nodes in MANET are mobile; this means that the nodes are not stationary in their places. Routing protocols in wired and wireless network cannot be use in MANET because of the nature of MANET.
Zone Routing Protocol (ZPR) is a hybrid routing protocol that uses proactive and reactive routing. Using proactive and reactive routing protocols alone are inefficient in an ad hoc network. Proactive routing is known as a table driven protocol that keeps an up-to-date topological map of the entire network. Since proactive routing maintains information that is immediately available, the delay before sending a packet is minimal. Pure proactive routing scheme uses large amount of bandwidth to keep routing information up-to-date. Overall, proactive routing uses excess bandwidth to maintain routing information. On the other hand, reactive routing uses queries that are flooded throughout the network. Together with long setup delay, pure reactive routing scheme is less suitable for real time traffic. Reactive routing involves long route request delay. Zone Routing Protocol uses the best properties of proactive and reactive routing to have an efficient, reliable and scalable protocol.
Architecture:
ZRP is based on zone concept. A routing zone is defined for each node separately, and the zones of neighboring nodes overlap. There are two types of node in ZRP, the interior and peripheral nodes. Peripheral nodes are nodes whose minimum distance to the central node is exactly equal to the zone radius. Zone radius is defined by the number of hops. Nodes in the zone radius are the border nodes of the zone. Interior nodes are nodes whose minimum distance is less than the zone radius. The number of nodes in zone routing can be regulated by adjusting the transmission power of the nodes. However, forming a large zone can affect the redundancy and reachability of the nodes.
In the ZRP the proactive routing refers to IntrA-zone Routing Protocol (IARP) while the reactive routing refers to IntEr-zone Routing Protocol. The IARP maintains the routing information of the nodes within the zone. IERP main job is to provide routing to the nodes that are belonged to a different zone.
ZRP uses bordercasting when node of local zone communicates to the other nodes of a different zone. Since the topology of local zone is known, it is used to reduce traffic when finding global route. Bordercasting utilizes the routing information provided by IARP to direct request to the border of the zone. The bordercast packet delivery service is provided by the Bordercast Resolution Protocol (BRP). BRP uses a map of an extended routing zone to construct bordercast trees for the query packets. Alternatively, it uses source routing based on the normal routing zone [1].
In order to detect new neighbor nodes and route failures, ZRP uses Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP). NDP is provided by Media Access Control which sends hello packets at regular intervals. Neighbor nodes that receive the hello packets update its table. Nodes that are not heard a given time will be removed from the table.
Route updates are triggered by NDP, which notifies IARP when the neighbor table is updated. IERP uses the routing table of IARP to respond to route queries. IERP forwards queries with BRP. BRP uses the routing table of IARP to guide route queries away from the query source [1].
Routing:
Node that has packet to send checks whether the destination node is within the local zone using the information provided by the IARP. If the node is within the local zone it can be routed proactively. If the destination node is outside zone, reactive routing is used.
Reactive routing is divided in two phases, route request and route reply phases. In the route request phase, the source node sends a route request packets to the peripheral nodes using BRP. If the receiver node knows the destination of the route request packet, it responds by sending a route reply back to the source. Otherwise, it continues the process by bordercasting the packet. In bordercasting process, the bordercasting node sends a route request to each of its peripheral nodes. This multicast transmission is used to reduce the resource usage.
Any node that can provide route to the destination will send reply. Nodes use the route information packet to send reply back to the source. When the packet reaches the destination, the addresses use is reversed and copied to the route reply packet. The other approach is to use next-hop addresses in the nodes along the path. The forwarding node records routing information as next hop addresses, which is used to send reply to the source. This approach saves transmission resources as the request and reply packets are smaller.
Source:
[1] Nicklas Beijar, Zone Routing Protocol
http://www.tct.hut.fi/opetus/s38030/k02/Papers/08-Nicklas.pdf

