Comparison of ad hoc and centralized multihop routing

In order to improve the coverage and traffic alleviate congestion in single-hop cellular networks (SCN) such as GSM, a new radio network architecture, called multihop cellular networks (MCN), was proposed and analyzed in [1]. The analytical results show that the MCN architecture can improve coverage and system capacity of SCNs up to 40%. Furthermore, a detail concept for realization of the MCN architecture was suggested in [2], where a cellular based multihop routing protocol was developed and investigated The simulation results indicate clearly that MCN with the cellular based routing protocol provides much higher system throughput than SCN. However the paper didn't give any reasons for using the cellular based routing instead of the ad hoc multihop routing protocols specified by IETF [4]. Hence, this paper is intended to fill this gap with the help of the analysis of routing protocol efficiency. We shall compare a cellular based routing protocol with three ad hoc routing protocols such as DSR, AODV and DSDV [4]. Based on analytical results, it can be concluded that 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.