For example:

If a company had 3 sites and they all had different subnets (10.1.x.x, 10.2.x.x, 10.3.x.x), it might be beneficial for speed purposes to install desktop central on a machine at each site and just have that machine control the nodes on that particular subnet. That way it's not going across the all subnets to apply patches (which could be painful if the wan is put together with limited bandwidth)

Is there a way to do this in desktop central? I see that you can install agents via IP range, but I can't seem to find anything that will discover machines via IP range. 

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Matt