Routing Solutions for Hierarchical MANETs

Hierarchical network architectures are widely deployed to reduce routing overheads and increase scalability. In our work, we are interested in large-scale Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) which are formed by interconnecting smaller clusters through a backbone. To support end-to-end routing in such networks, we employ a hierarchical approach as follows. The clusters are MANETs, running OLSR locally. Each cluster has a gateway, and the gateways are interconnected through a backbone. In this paper, we study three distinct solutions to provide end-to-end connectivity through the backbone: flooding all data packets through the backbone, modifying a pro-active MANET routing protocol, and modifying an on-demand MANET routing protocol. Running extensive simulations in OMNeT++, our results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.