An analytical study on routing overhead of two-level cluster-based routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

In recent years, a lot of routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). These protocols can employ two types of routing structure, flat or hierarchical. When compared to flat routing protocols, hierarchical ones incur much less routing overhead, which helps provide a better scalability in large-scale MANETs. However, different types of hierarchical routing strategies may produce different levels of routing overhead. In this paper, we focus on investigating routing overhead of four types of two-level generic cluster-based routing protocols, based on a parameterized hexagon-like topology model as well as a traffic model and a mobility model. Through such investigation, routing overheads of each type of routing protocols are quantitatively summarized, which will help understand and develop scalable routing protocols for specific MANETs