Patent ID: 8341289

Claim:
A method of communicating in an ad-hoc network, comprising: providing at least one portable network device including a transceiver and a processor that implements a data communication protocol to communicate communications data to other network devices through one or more network ports connected to the other network devices in the ad-hoc network, the communications data being divided into data packets, and each data packet being encoded with a protocol header that includes the packet's source address and cost information; detecting an incoming data packet received by the portable network device; identifying an ingress port on which the data packet was received; reading the packet's source address and cost information; comparing the packet's source address, cost information, and ingress port with source address, cost information, and ingress port stored in a bridge table in the portable network device to determine retransmission parameters for each data packet; determining based on the retransmission parameters whether the data packet should be dropped or retransmitted through one or more of the network ports of the portable network device and processing the data packet accordingly; and determining whether lower cost routing is available for packets to the source based on the results of said comparing step and, if so, storing new cost and routing information associated with the lower cost routing in the bridge table.