Summary
Geographic routing in mobile ad hoc network (MANET) has gained much attention even though it fails to find a route when a node meets a void zone (hole). Therefore, an efficient approach is required to avoid the void issues and to effectively transfer the data packets if a path is available between the source and destination nodes. For such, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm is introduced with geographical routing protocol (GRP) for avoiding the void, which selects the shortest route for routing from the source to the destination by combining firefly (FF) algorithm and galactic swarm optimization (HFFGSO). This proposed algorithm exploits the strengths of both the FF algorithm and galactic swarm mechanisms. In this paper, the cross‐layer design approach is implemented, which contains data link and network layer. The proposed hybrid FFGSO‐GRP algorithm improves the routing process within these layers. The implementation process for this proposed technique is carried out in NS2 simulator. From the simulation results, it is observed that our hybrid protocol when compared with the existing approaches proves its significance in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), delay, throughput, energy efficiency, power consumption, routing overhead and hop count.