Comparison of ad hoc and centralized multihop routing

In order to improve coverage and alleviate traffic congestion in single-hop cellular networks (SCN), such as GSM, a new radio network architecture, multihop cellular networks (MCN), was proposed and analyzed (see Lin, Y.D. et al., IEEE INFOCOM, 2000). MCN architecture can improve the coverage and system capacity of SCNs by up to 40%. A detailed concept for realizing the MCN architecture was suggested by R. Ananthapadmanabha, et al. (see Proc. PIMRC, 2001), where a cellular based multihop routing protocol was developed and investigated. Their results indicate that MCN with the cellular based routing protocol provides much higher system throughput than SCN. However the paper gave no reasons for using cellular based routing instead of the ad hoc multihop routing protocols specified by IETF (see www.ietf.org). This paper is intended to fill that gap with the help of an analysis of routing protocol efficiency. We compare a cellular based routing protocol with three ad hoc routing protocols, DSR, AODV and DSDV. Based on analytical results, it can be concluded that the overhead of the cellular based routing protocol is not heavily influenced by network size and mobility. This translates to excellent scalability for large and dynamic MCNs, while AODV, DSR and DSDV are suitable for MCNs with a small number of hops and low mobility.