Patent ID: 7720026

Claim:
A method for organizing and maintaining an ad-hoc network for communication between a plurality of moving devices comprising the steps of: (a) (a) grouping said plurality of moving devices into at least one local peer group (LPG); (b) ordering said plurality of moving devices within each LPG based upon a relative position of each of said plurality of devices within each LPG; and (c) assigning a unique identifier for each of said plurality of moving devices, where said unique identifier is based in part on the LPG in which the corresponding moving device is located, and wherein said unique identifier is an IP address that is assigned based upon a predefined network prefix concatenated with a unique LPG identification and a unique moving device identification; and wherein said LPGs are divided into equivalent cells (EC) defined by a group of moving devices that are within a one hop of each other such that only one transmission of a message is needed to reach any of the group of moving devices within the EC, said EC is controlled by an equivalent cell header (ECH) device; and wherein a plurality of ECs form a linearly linked chain structure and the ECH device in each EC releases control messages and the non-ECH devices only listen for control messages.