A Cluster-Based Framework for Spontaneous Collaboration without Infrastructure

In this paper, the authors describe the development of a framework for collaborative spontaneous networks. A spontaneous network is created when a group of users comes together and uses wireless computing devices in order to carry- out a collaborative activity. The target of this framework is to provide efficient communications for groups of users in such a scarce resource environment. The architecture proposed in this work is based on three main design decisions: multicast technology is used to reduce the traffic, a clustering scheme has been proposed to minimize the network overhead and a cross-layer adaptation between our framework and the multicast routing protocol allows our architecture to take advantage of the network topology information collected by the routing protocols at the network layer. The experiments performed using a real testbed show that the framework provides rapid response times in static and dynamic environments.