A method of assessing a communication route comprising a plurality of links between nodes in a mobile ad-hoc network comprises calculating the two-hop residual bandwidth of each node I of the route as
where B is the raw channel bandwidth, the summation is the overall consumed bandwidth from node I's two-hop neighborhood nodes, JεN(I) and φ is a factor to account for protocol overhead, which may include handshaking, packet collision, re-transmission and/or back-off scheme traffic. An estimated transmission time for each of a plurality of links between said nodes may be calculated taking said two-hop residual bandwidth into account. For each possible route, a route efficiency function is determined at least by summing the estimated transmission times for all the links in the route, and the route in which the value of the route efficiency function is smallest is selected.