The convenience, utility value, and ease of deployment has led to an ubiquitous integration of mobile computing devices which will, in future, form mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), several orders of magnitude larger than what current protocols can handle. Safari, a scalable ad hoc networking architecture, promises to provide scalable routing and conventional internet services like SMTP and DNS in ad hoc networks of the size of 10's of thousands of nodes. Firstly, this thesis analyzes the buoy protocol which assigns spatially meaningful hierarchical addresses to nodes in Safari, specifically its stability and convergence properties. Secondly, it characterizes some of the control overhead in Safari by leveraging physical models whose applicability is demonstrated through simulations. This leads to insights on parameter settings and design choices in the Safari architecture to reduce overhead, a necessary feature in the bandwidth and energy limited ad hoc network environment.