Impact analysis of hierarchical transitions in multi-hop clustered networks

Nowadays, the existing myriad of wireless capable devices has led to the development of numerous multi-hop routing protocols. In particular, due to the scale of these networks, routing protocols with well defined hierarchies have been proposed. By defining different size scenarios with twenty different possible transitions in hierarchies for 2, 3 and 4 clusters, the impact of using such mechanism is evaluated. Simulation based results are presented for 2 different routing protocols showing that a Deferred Routing approach is able to successfully handle hierarchical transitions, delivering up to 4.5 times more data traffic than the remaining protocols, while maintaining a lower overhead. These results motivate the further utilization of such scheme for future large scale wireless networks.