When a routing protocol for manet networks (mobile and ad hoc networks) does a route discovery, it does not discover the shortest route but the route through which the route request flood traveled faster. In addition, since nodes are moving, a route that was the shortest one at discovery time might stop being so in quite a short period of time. This causes, not only a much bigger end-to-end delay, but also more collisions and a faster power consumption.

In order to avoid all the performance loss due to these problems, this paper develops a technique to periodically discover shortcuts to the active routes that can be used with any destination vector routing protocol. It also shows how the same mechanism can be used as a bidirectional route recovery mechanism.