A hybrid zone-based routing protocol based on ZRP and DSR for emergency applications

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) can be rethought for use in disaster relief operations due to their attractive features, such as no infrastructure, fast deployment, and self-organisability. It has also been observed that improving scalability, mobility, bandwidth, and energy efficiency has always been a challenging aspect of ad-hoc routing protocols like MANET. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of all the promising routing protocols in MANET, considering key constraints such as energy efficiency and throughput delivery in disaster relief operations. After that, we proposed HZDL, a hybrid routing protocol based mainly on ZRP and DSR with cluster hierarchy features from the LEACH algorithm. The key controlling parameters include the mobile node's processing speed, background running applications, data storage capacity, and residual battery power. The results of a comprehensive simulation encompassing several performance measurement matrices reveal that the proposed algorithm provides significantly improved results towards improving the node's lifetime and achievable throughput.