Simulation Comparison of Hierarchical and Flat Ad Hoc Networks

Traditional ad hoc networks have flat architecture, which suffers from poor scalability. Theoretical analysis and experimental results imply that throughput for each node decreases rapidly toward zero while the number of nodes increases in such architecture. Hierarchical architecture in ad hoc networks present a trade off between cellular networks and pure ad hoc networks, in that data may be forwarded in a multi-hop fashion or through the infrastructure. In this paper, we focus on simulations of static ad hoc networks in two different architectures, namely hierarchical and flat. The paper is to investigate, benefits of hierarchical ad hoc network via computer simulations in terms of quality of service (QoS) provisioning, which includes transmit capacity, delay, delivery ratio, and scalability of the network. keywords: Ad hoc networks, sensor networks, wireless networks, hierarchical networks.