Method and apparatus to provide a routing protocol for wireless devices

1. A routed wireless network comprising:

a plurality of wired access points;

a plurality of clients, each client belonging to a cluster of clients administered by a single server and such that membership in a cluster is elected by the client through the selection of a beacon to rebroadcast; and

one path identified by one beacon designated as the optimal path, setting a default gateway as identified in the optimal path, and rebroadcasting only the beacon representing the optimal path.

2. The network of claim 1 , wherein the membership in the cluster may change as a result of a client roaming from one region to another within the network.

3. The network of claim 1 , wherein the membership in the cluster may change as a result of the addition of a new server to the network.

4. The network of claim 1 , wherein the new server may be a client that is converted into a server by adding a wired connection.

5. The network of claim 1 , wherein the membership in the cluster may change as a result of the server selected by the client failing to provide adequate service.

6. The network of claim 1 , wherein server capacity is optimized among the clusters.

7. The network of claim 1 , wherein response delay experienced by the clients is minimized.

8. The network of claim 1 , wherein cluster membership is elected to lead to more efficient utilization of network capacity.

9. The network of claim 1 , wherein each server of a cluster is limited to a number of clients.

10. The network of claim 1 , wherein each server can perform at least one of client authentication, billing, network monitoring, bandwidth provisioning and quality of service guarantee.

11. The network of claim 1 , wherein cluster size of a server is determined by a capacity of the server.

12. The network of claim 1 , wherein mobile clients can move from one cluster to another cluster.

13. The network of claim 1 , wherein a new routing table is generated when a client changes cluster membership.

14. The network of claim 1 , wherein new clusters may be created to enable the network to adjust to available backhaul.

15. The network of claim 1 , further comprising:

determining if there is a previous default gateway identified; and

deleting the previous default gateway from memory.

16. A routed wireless network comprising:

a plurality of wired access points;

a plurality of clients, each client belonging to a cluster of clients administered by a single server and such that membership in a cluster is elected by the client through the selection of a beacon to rebroadcast;

wherein the beacon broadcast by the server includes a hop-count set to zero;

each client that receives the beacon rebroadcasting the beacon with the hop-count incremented by one;

such that each client receiving the beacon knows a way to reach the server and the number of hops in this path.

17. A routed network comprising:

a plurality of wired access points;

a plurality of clients, each client belonging to a cluster of clients administered by a single server and such that membership in a cluster is elected by the client through the selection of a beacon to rebroadcast;

wherein each client that receives the beacon rebroadcasting the beacon with an address of the client added to the beacon; such that each client receiving the beacon has a complete path to the server.

18. A routed wireless network comprising:

a plurality of wired access points;

a plurality of clients, each client belonging to a cluster of clients administered by a single server and such that membership in a cluster is elected by the client through the selection of a beacon to rebroadcast;

wherein each client collects all beacons, and selects a single beacon to rebroadcast.

19. The network of claim 18 , wherein selecting a beacon includes identifying a number of hops between the server and the client for each beacon, and selecting the beacon with the lowest number of hops.