Zone Routing Protocol

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Zone Routing Protocol or ZRP is a routing protocol for wireless networking proposed by Zygmunt J. Haas, Marc R. Pearlman, and Prince Samar of Cornell University in 2002. This protocol divides the network into overlapping routing zones and runs independent protocols that work within and between the zones.

The intra-zone protocol (IARP) operates within a zone and learns all the possible routes, proactively. So, all nodes within a zone know about their zone topology very well. The inter-zone protocol (IERP) is reactive, and a source node finds a destination node which is not located within the same zone by sending RREQ messages to all border nodes. This continues until the destination is found.

Routing zone diameter is variable and this should be chosen based on the topology. By zoning, control message overhead is attempted to be lowered. Current zone size estimation techniques allow ZRP to operate with a control traffic volume within 2% of the optimal value.

ZRP uses BRP (Bordercast Resolution Protocol) (ZYGMUNT J. HAAS, MARC R. PEARLMAN, PRINCE SAMAR The Bordercast Routing Protocol (BRP) for Ad Hoc Networks) to guide the route requests of the global reactive IERP.

A reference implementation is available under the GPL license.

The protocol was proposed to the IETF MANET working group in various versions from June 2001 to July 2002, but was not adopted by the group.