Patent ID: 8179837

Claim:
An ad-hoc network, comprising: at least one processor; and at least one memory, the at least one memory storing instructions which when executed cause the at least one processor to perform as: a clusterhead node; and a plurality of nodes associated with the clusterhead, at least one of the plurality of nodes is a remote node and at least one is an intermediate node, the remote node indirectly communicating with the clusterhead through the intermediate node, wherein the network state information includes at least one of load, dropped packets and bandwidth capacity, the intermediate node receives the network state information transmitted by the remote node and subsequently re-transmits the network state information received from the remote node in a summarized form, the intermediate node summarizes the network state information of the remote node by averaging at least a portion of the network state information of the remote node with the network state information of the intermediate node, and each of the plurality of nodes collect network state information and transmit at least a portion of the collected network state information at a predetermined rate, the remote node transmits a smaller amount of information at a higher rate relative to that of the intermediate node, and the intermediate node transmits a larger amount of information at a lower rate relative to that of the remote node.