Fixed infrastructured networks naturally support centralized approaches for
group management and information provisioning. Contrary to infrastructured
networks, in multi-hop ad-hoc networks each node acts as a router as well as
sender and receiver. Some applications, however, requires hierarchical
arrangements that-for practical reasons-has to be done locally and
self-organized. An additional challenge is to deal with mobility that causes
permanent network partitioning and re-organizations. Technically, these
problems can be tackled by providing additional uplinks to a backbone network,
which can be used to access resources in the Internet as well as to inter-link
multiple ad-hoc network partitions, creating a hybrid wireless network. In this
paper, we present a prototypically implemented hybrid wireless network system
optimized for multimedia content distribution. To efficiently manage the ad-hoc
communicating devices a weighted clustering algorithm is introduced. The
proposed localized algorithm deals with mobility, but does not require
geographical information or distances.Comment: 2nd ACM Workshop on Wireless Multimedia Networking and Performance
Modeling 2006 (ISBN 1-59593-485