US Patent 11757770 Hybrid ad-hoc routing protocol

A routing device for forwarding data packets in a data network is described. The routing device establishes a communicative connection with multiple other such routing devices that implement the same functions. A data network includes multiple routing devices as described herein. In that data network, each routing device implements and applies a proactive approach with routing tables in a stable part of the data network, and a reactive approach in an unstable part of the data network. When a packet is transmitted from a stable part of the data network to an unstable part of the data network (or vice versa), the forwarding approach is changed along the path of the packet. Thus, the routing device and the data network mitigate the effect of overhead of proactive routing approaches and the latency of reactive routing approaches.