Performance Comparison of Zoning Techniques in Geographic Forwarding Rules for Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a set of devices communicating directly with each other without the aid of an infrastructure. They exchange broadcast messages to detect links between nodes and to create routing tables. However, the broadcasting leads to the multiplication of redundant retransmissions. These retransmissions decrease the performance of the network. The Geographic Forwarding Rules (GFRs) are a technique that allows to scale down the ripple effects of broadcasting in order to increase the reliability of the network. They have been used in the context of the Optimized Link State Routing protocol (OLSR) and have reduced the useless transmissions of topology control (TC) messages. The GFRs use the location of the originator of the TC message to split nodes into virtual groups called the propagation zones. The algorithm freely advertises TC messages inside each zone and avoids redundant retransmissions between them. The authors of GFR presented several zoning techniques. However, they have studied only one method. In this paper, we draw analysis of different techniques to compute the propagation zones. We compare, by simulations, the improvement provided by the GFR algorithm on OLSR protocol using different partitioning methods.