Hierarchical routing is a promising approach for point-topoint routing with very small routing state. While there are many theoretical analyses and high-level simulations demonstrating its benefits, there has been little work to evaluate it in a realistic wireless sensor network setting. Based on numerous proposed hierarchical routing infrastructures, we develop a framework that captures the common characteristics of the infrastructures and identifies design points where the infrastructures differ. We then evaluate the implementation of the framework in TOSSIM and on a 60-node testbed. We demonstrate that from the practical perspective hierarchical routing is also an appealing routing approach for sensor networks. Despite only logarithmic routing state, it can offer