Simulation and Performance Analysis of the Zone Routing Protocol for Tactical Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This is a NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A224383. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: This thesis presents a simulation and analysis of the Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) for mobile ad hoc network (MANET) environments using the OPNET simulation tool. ZRP is being suggested for possible implementation in the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) for the United States military. Utilizing a ZRP OPNET model that was developed at Cornell University, the analysis focuses on key performance parameters that include overhead generation, network adaptation, efficiency, and routing zone optimization. The ZRP model's traffic monitoring has been enhanced for this work to identify the engineering tradeoffs between efficiency and performance. The results of this thesis provide valuable insight into the analysis and performance with varying zone routing radius, node velocity, and node density. Critical MANET environmental and simulation parameters required for JTRS implementation into the military battlespace have been studied.