Electronic collaboration among devices in a geographically localized environment is made possible with the implementation of IEEE 802.11 based wireless ad hoc networks. Dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc networks(MANETs) may lead to unpredictable intervention of attacks or fault occurrence, which consequently may partition the network, degrade its performance, violate the QoS requirements and most importantly, affect bandwidth allocation to mobile nodes in the network. In this paper, we propose a new distributed cluster scheme for MANETs, especially in harsh environments, based on the concept of survivability to support QoS requirements and to protect bandwidth efficiently. With the incorporation of clustering algorithms in survivability technology, we employ a simple network configuration and expect to reduce occurrences of faults in MANETs. At the same time, we address the scalability problem, which represents a great challenge to network configuration. We do expect a simplification of...