Ad hoc mobile wireless networks are self-configuring infrastructureless networks of mobile devices connected via wireless links. Each device can send and receive data, but it should also forward traffic unrelated to its own use. All need to maintain their autonomy, and effectively preserve their resources (e.g. battery power). Moreover, they can leave the network at any time. Their intrinsic dynamicity and fault tolerance makes them suitable for applications, such as emergency response and disaster relief, when infrastructure is nonexistent or damaged due to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and flooding, as well as more mundane, day-to-day, uses where their flexibility would be advantageous. Routing is the fundamental research issue for such networks and refers to finding and maintaining routes between nodes. Moreover, it involves selecting the best route where many may be available. However, due to the freedom of movement of nodes, new routes need to be constantly recalculated. Most routing protocols use pure broadcasting to discover new routes, which takes up a substantial amount of bandwidth. Intelligent rebroadcasting reduces these overheads by calculating the usefulness of a rebroadcast, and the likelihood of message collisions. Unfortunately, this introduces latency and parts of the network may become unreachable. This dissertation presents a routing protocol that uses a new parallel and distributed guided broadcasting technique to reduce redundant broadcasting and to accelerate the path discovery process, while maintaining a high reachability ratio as well as keeping node energy consumption low. This broadcasting scheme is implemented in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) and a Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). To reduce overheads further, a Zone based Routing with Parallel Collision Guided Broadcasting Protocol (ZCG) in MANET is introduced. This uses a one hop clustering algorithm that splits the network into zones led by reliable leaders that are mostly static and have plentiful battery resources. For WMN, a Social-aware Routing Protocol (SCG) is designed that draws upon social network theory to associate longstanding social ties between nodes, using their communication patterns to divide the network into conceptual social groups, which allows cluster members to protect each other from redundant broadcasts by using intelligent rebroadcasting. The performance characteristics of the new protocols are established through simulations that measure their behaviour and by comparing them to other well-known routing protocols, namely the: AODV, DSR, TORA and the OLSR, as appropriate, it emerges that two new protocols, the ZCG and SCG, perform better in certain conditions, with the latter doing consistently well under most circumstances.

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