Patent ID: 7933271

Claim:
A Media Access Control (MAC) forwarding method for multi-hop routing in an ad-hoc communication system between vehicles, comprising the steps of: a) in an OSI MAC layer, receiving frames in nodes and checking whether each received frame is a duplicate frame (S 201 ), wherein each of said nodes is located in a vehicle in said ad-hoc communications system, and each of said nodes includes a forwarding cache table (FCT) and a sequence number table (SNT); b) updating (S 202 ) information in said FCT when the received frame is a duplicate frame, c) when the received frame is not a duplicate frame, 1) updating (S 205 ) information in said SNT, 2) checking (S 206 ) whether a destination address of the received frame is the node's own address, and if the destination address is the node's own address, i) update the FCT information (S 207 ), transmit an Ack signal (S 208 ) and transfer the frame to a layer above the OSI MAC layer (S 209 ), ii) otherwise, update the FCT information (S 211 , S 216 , S 219 ) and selectively perform one of: insert an implicit unicast frame into an interface queue (S 214 ), insert a flooding frame into the interface queue (S 218 ), abandon the frame (S 220 ).