Patent ID: 8493943

Claim:
A geographical wireless ad-hoc communication network comprising: a plurality of nodes situated in a geographical area, said geographical area being partitioned into a plurality of geographical cells, each of said geographical cells being associated with respective unique coordinates in a geographical coordinate system, each node including: a transmitter, transmitting messages over at least one transmission channel; a receiver, receiving messages over said at least one transmission channel; a tactical database, storing information relating to the partition of said geographical area into a plurality of geographical cells, said tactical database further storing tactical data respective of said node and tactical data respective of nodes in said network other than said node; a geographical cell processor, coupled with said transmitter, with said receiver and with said tactical database, for identifying the geographical position of said node in said geographical coordinate system, said geographical cell processor is further operative to associate said node with one of said geographical cells according to said geographical position of said node and said respective unique coordinates of each of said geographical cells; a situation awareness and collision avoidance messages processor coupled with said transmitter, with said receiver and with said tactical database, for periodically transmitting via said transmitter, situation awareness messages, and for periodically receiving said situation awareness message from nodes other than said node, via said receiver, said situation awareness messages include at least said node identification representation, said node geographical position and said node protocol information; said node, together with additional ones of nodes other than said node, all associated with a certain one of said geographical cells, being defined as cell members of said geographical cell, one of said cell-members is determined a cell-representative for said geographical cell, said cell-representative transmits cell-representative messages to nodes that are within a determined distance from said cell-representative, said cell-representative messages at least include information relating to said cell-members of said certain one geographical cell, said cell-representative transmits said cell-representative messages over a transmission channel associated with the respective cell thereof, a node receives cell-representative messages of selected cell-representatives.