Patent ID: 7408911

Claim:
A method for determining a route between nodes in a wireless communication network, the method comprising: maintaining a respective link reliability value for each of a plurality of respective links between one of the nodes in the network and other nodes in the network; comparing the respective link reliability values to a threshold value; controlling the node to issue a route warning message identifying any of the links whose respective link reliability value fails to meet the threshold value before the link has failed; controlling a node that receives the route warning message and that is sourcing data packets to a destination node whose link is identified by the route warning message to perform a route discovery process to discover another route to the destination node; repeating the route discovery process at periodic intervals, wherein when the node performs the route discovery process at each periodic interval, the node includes a periodic identifier in a route request packet that the node sends during the route discovery process to differentiate the route request packet being sent during a periodic performance of the route discovery process from a normal route request packet.