In this thesis, the adoption of the hierarchical routing paradigm to achieve a scalable network layer for ad hoc networks has been proposed. The main concept of hierarchical routing is to keep, at any node, complete routing information about nodes which are close to it and lesser information about nodes located further away. The Augmented Tree-based Routing protocol, a routing protocol for ad hoc networks exploiting both a location-aware addressing schema and a distribute hash table (DHT) system, has been proposed. The adopted addressing schema allows nodes to adopt hierarchical routing, limiting so the overhead introduced in the network, while the DHT system provides the mapping between transient identifiers and node identities. Since the Augmented Tree-based Routing protocol adopts a multi-path strategy and since most studies in the area of multi-path routing focus on heuristic methods and the performances of these strategies are commonly evaluated by numerical simulations, an analytical framework to evaluate the performance gain achieved by multi-path routing has been proposed. The framework is based on on graph theory and on terminal-pair routing reliability (TPRR) as performance measure. Moreover, some features of the proposed protocol has been exploited design a peer-to-peer (P2P) system over a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) resorting to a cross-layer approach. It has been proved that simply deploying P2P systems over MANETs may cause poor performances. By coupling both the direct and the indirect key-based routing at the network layer and by resorting to the same hierarchical address space structure of ATR, we are able to build a P2P overlay network in which the logical proximity agrees with the physical one, limiting so the message overhead and avoiding the redundancy. Finally, by extending the proposed location-aware addressing to match with the opportunistic forwarding protocol, a novel routing protocol for disruption tolerant network (DTN) and delay tolerant network (DTN) has been proposed. By exploiting both the temporal diversity and the broadcast nature of the wireless propagation, such a protocol can enable connectivity in ad hoc environments characterized by non stationary wireless propagation as well as sparse topologies.