Data replication is an indispensable service for mobile ad hoc networks and it helps to increase data availability, reduce communication overhead, achieve fault-tolerance and load balancing. Our scalable and reactive data replication framework SCALAR operates in a peer-to-peer manner where the network nodes construct a connected dominating set based on the topology graph, and use that virtual backbone for efficient data lookup and replication. In this study, we compare the performance of SCALAR with the well-known SAF and DAFN replication approaches on realistic application scenarios simulating university campus and shopping mail settings. We examine data accessibility, protocol overhead, effects of data request probability and percentage of popular data items in the system through extensive runs conducted on SWANS simulator. SCALAR is shown to outperform the other approaches in terms of data accessibility and overhead, and demonstrated as an efficient and scalable replication solution for mobile ad hoc applications.