ABSTRACT

A novel self-organizing hierarchical architecture is proposed for improving the scalability properties of ad-hoc wireless networks. This paper focuses on the design and evaluation of routing protocols applicable to this class of hierarchical ad-hoc networks. The performance of a hierarchical network with the popular Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is evaluated and compared with that of conventional flat ad-hoc networks using an ns-2 simulation model. The results for an example Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) scenario show significant capacity increases with the hierarchical architecture. Simulation results using NS-2 show that our proposed schemes achieve good performance.