Wireless sporadic communication protocol for supporting cluster-to-base station communication

Recently, mobile computers have become able to communicate with each other by using a wireless LAN protocol, e.g. IEEE 802.11 and HIPERLAN, for supporting various Internet services. In the case when a mobile computer changes location with high speed, less messages are exchanged between the mobile computer and the Internet. This paper proposes a novel routing protocol CB-WSCP for mobile clustered networks in which mobile computers with almost the same velocity and communication with each other by multi-hop transmission form a cluster. Here, communication between a cluster and a base station is available only if a mobile computer in the cluster is within transmission range of the base station. Hence, it is required to support sporadic communication. For achieving wider bandwidth even though the cluster moves with high speed, the proposed protocol achieves switching of gateways and updating of routing tables.