RESEARCH ARTICLE PSO‐IZRP: New enhanced zone routing protocol based on PSO independent zone radius estimation Nassir Harrag 1 | Allaoua Refoufi 1 | Abdelghani Harrag 2,3 1 Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, Ferhat Abbas University, El Baz, CP 19000 Setif, Algeria 2 Optics and Precision Mechanics Institute, Ferhat Abbas University, Cite Maabouda, 19000 Setif, Algeria 3 CCNS Laboratory, Dep. of Electronics, Fac. of Technology, Ferhat Abbas University, Cite Maabouda, 19000 Setif, Algeria Correspondence Nassir Harrag, Department of Informatics, Faculty of Sciences, Ferhat Abbas University, El Baz, CP 19000 Setif, Algeria. Email: nassir.harrag@univ‐setif.dz Abstract In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols for MANETs have been developed. Zone routing protocol is one of them, which is a hybrid routing pro- tocol that combines the best futures of proactive and reactive approaches. The proactive part of the protocol maintains routing information for a local neigh- borhood, known as routing zone, while the reactive part acquire routes to des- tinations beyond this routing zone. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for zone radius determination based on particles swarm optimization. The use of PSO allows ZRP protocol to dynamically adjust itself to the environments conditions by sizing each node's routing zone. The proposed algorithm as well as the new ZRP protocol are implemented under NS‐2 simulator and tested using different scenario simulating protocol environment changes. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm to reduce the control traf- fic overhead and the average end‐2‐end delay and to increase the packet deliv- ery ratio resulting to an improvement of the network quality of service. Besides the use of particle swarm optimization to tune the zone routing protocol radius, the contribution consists of enhancing the performance of the zone routing protocol to improve the network quality of service with low control traffic overhead, low end‐to‐end delay, and high packet delivery ratio. KEYWORDS mobile ad‐hoc network, particle swarm optimization, zone radius, zone routing protocol 1 | INTRODUCTION Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile devices that can communicate with each other using wireless links. MANET is characterized by a distributed, dynamic, self‐organizing architecture. Each node in the network is capable to communicate with each other even in out‐of‐range conditions with intermediate nodes performing the routing functions. These characteristics of MANET make ad hoc networks well suited for military activities, crisis man- agement services, disaster recovery, classrooms, and conference halls. 1-4 The development of dynamic routing protocols that can efficiently discover and maintain routes to needed network destinations is considered now as the major challenge for MANETs due to many factors such as rapidly changing con- nectivity, network partition, higher error rates, collision interference, bandwidth, and power constrain. Thus, a lot of innovative protocols have been introduced in recent years. 5-7 These routing Protocols can be classified as follows: Received: 1 July 2017 Revised: 23 October 2017 Accepted: 23 April 2018 DOI: 10.1002/jnm.2461 Int J Numer Model. 2018;e2461. https://doi.org/10.1002/jnm.2461 Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jnm 1 of 16