Patent ID: 7957355

Claim:
A method for relaying communications among a plurality of communication nodes in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET), wherein each node is a device that has computing and wireless communication broadcasting and receiving capabilities plus a broadcastable identifier, wherein wireless communication comprises broadcasting a packet containing a message portion, and wherein the method is implemented in each node such that each node considers itself to be a current node in the context of the method steps it carries out; the method in the current node comprising the steps of: identifying a set of neighbor nodes for the current node by determining whether a node qualifies by being within wireless communication range; without knowledge of a route to a packet's ultimate destination, broadcasting any packet originated at the current node, or re-broadcasting any received packet to relay it, by randomly selecting no more than one of the neighbor nodes to have its identifier set in the packet as a designated receiver node that should re-broadcast the packet; and examining received packets to learn the designated receiver node identifier if one is contained therein, then using the following steps to guide re-broadcasting actions: if the current node is the designated receiver node, then re-broadcasting the packet; and if the current node is not the designated receiver node, then only re-broadcasting the packet according to a predetermined non-designated receiver re-broadcast probability.