Scalability and routing performance of future autonomous networks

Nowadays, the existing myriad of wireless capable devices has led to the development of numerous multi-hop routing protocols. From proactive to reactive and even hybrid routing approaches, these protocols have motivated the definition of autonomous and ubiquitous ad-hoc networks. Such networks have been idealized not only for disaster and rural scenarios, but also for an increasingly demanding social context in urban areas. However, being able to handle these networks in a large scale, still remains a challenge. Even though several routing solutions resort to clustering and hierarchies in order to limit routing information, the existing nodes´ interactions are typically disregarded and mobility amongst different clusters still raises routing issues. In this work the scalability of three routing protocols will be analysed, by defining different size scenarios, while also assessing their routing performance with a mobile node moving between different clusters. Theoretical and simulation based results are presented, using twenty different possible transitions through the existing clusters. This evaluation provides an important contribution, revealing that hierarchical routing organizations´ scalability is closer to what is theoretically expected, contrary to other routing solutions. Moreover, regarding the best routing performance which takes into account communities, these results motivate the further utilization of such schemes for future large scale ubiquitous networks.