Patent ID: 7860049

Claim:
A communication route control method for a wireless multi-hop network which forms a multi-hop network in which control packets are exchanged by wireless signals between a plurality of communication terminals serving as nodes of the network, retains topology information of the multi-hop network, and controls communication routes of the packets exchanged between the communication terminals based on the topology information, said communication route control method comprising: a step in which each of the communication terminals detects its own movement information including at least a movement speed; a step in which each of the communication terminals controls the exchange frequency of the control packet to be exchanged with other communication terminals on the multi-hop network based on the detected movement information so as to reduce a control load in accordance with its movement state; a step in which each of the communication terminals updates the topology information of the multi-hop network that each itself retains based on the control packets from the other communication terminals; a step in which each of the communication terminals exchanges neighbor detection messages with neighboring communication terminals on the wireless multi-hop network as the control packets; a step in which, when a link with each of the neighboring communication terminals has been established by the exchange of the neighbor detection message, each of the communication terminals retains, in addition to terminal identification information of each of the neighboring communication terminals, identification attribute information of the neighbor detection message received from each of the neighboring communication terminals at the time point when the link has been established as link information included in the topology information; and a step in which each of the communication terminals broadcasts, as the control packet, a network topology message including the link information composed of the terminal identification information of each of the neighboring communication terminals and identification attribute information of the neighbor detection message on the multi-hop network, wherein each of the communication terminals broadcasts said network topology message to be received by all other communication terminals on said multi-hop network.