In mobile ad hoc networks(MANETs),if a muhihop route breaks,route maintenance is typicallyperformed to establish a new route which causes high control overhead and long packet delay.To decreasethe time of recovery and the overhead of maintenance,a new route maintenance mechanism in which themaintenance is confined to the vicinity of the broken link is proposed.This mechanism patches brokenroute through some other nodes in which only nodes near the broken link(s)may need to be substitutedand the rest of nodes can be retained on the route.The broken link can be repaired without consideringits relative position in the whole path,so the ability of dealing with link failure is improved obviously.Simulation results show that the proposed strategy improves network performance significantly,such as inmerits of control overhead and packet delay.
