An ad-hoc network is the cooperative engagement o f a collection of Mobile Hosts without the required intervention of any c e n tralized Access Point. In this paper we present an innovative design for the operation of such ad-hoc networks. The basic idea of the design is to operate each Mobile Host as a specialized router, which periodically advertises its view of the interconnection topology with other Mobile Hosts within the network. This amounts to a new sort of routing protocol. We have i n vestigated modi cations to the basic BellmanFord routing mechanisms, as speci ed by RIP 5], to make it suitable for a dynamic and self-starting network mechanism as is required by users wishing to utilize adhoc networks. Our modi cations address some of the previous objections to the use of Bellman-Ford, related to the poor looping properties of such algorithms in the face of broken links and the resulting time dependent nature of the interconnection topology describing the links between the Mobile Hosts. Finally, w e describe the ways in which the basic network-layer routing can be modi ed to provide MAC-layer support for ad-hoc networks.