The Comparison Study of Flat Routing and Hierarchical Routing in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the flat routing and hierarchical routing protocols in ad hoc wireless networks. Flat and hierarchical routing are two most typical routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks. There have been many researches working on studying different flat or hierarchical routing protocols separately. However, there are little works about a comprehensive comparison study between these two kinds of routing protocols. As there are many protocols for both flat and hierarchical routing protocol, it is necessary to study their advantages and disadvantages, so that we could provide guidance for the deployment of different protocols in different networks configuration. This paper will study the performance of hierarchical routing protocols as compare to flat routing protocols. Our study is based on an extensive simulation using NS2