H 2 O: Hierarchically optimized hybrid routing strategies for multihop wireless networks

Abstract

This paper presents a semi-infrastructured architecture for multihop wireless networks and its routing strategies called H 2 O (Hierarchically Optimized Hybrid). We show that the semi-infrastructured network architecture is very efficient in terms of scalability and reliability. Such advantages mainly come from the hierarchical network architecture combined with a hybrid routing protocol. We evaluate the proposed approach by using simulation tests with several scenarios. In the simulation, we observed that no specific routing strategy (e.g. a single hybrid way to combine a proactive and reactive routing protocol adapted in previously proposed ZRP or ZHLS) can always satisfy various requirements of applications. Therefore, it is required to make a hybrid routing strategy differently from application to application. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.