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