Multimedia content distribution in hybrid wireless networks using weighted clustering

• Authors: Adrian Andronache;Matthias R. Brust;Steffen Rothkugel
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international workshop on Wireless multimedia networking and performance modeling
• Year: 2006

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驴for practical reasons驴has to be done locally and self-organized. An additional challenge is to deal with mobility that causes permanent network partitioning and reorganizations. 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