A proactive link-state routing protocol designed for mobile ad-hoc networks is disclosed, which provides hop-by-hop routing along shortest paths to each destination. Each node running the present protocol will compute a source tree (providing paths to all reachable nodes) based on partial topology information stored in its topology table. To minimize overhead, each node reports only "part" of its source tree to neighbors. The present invention employs a combination of periodic and differential updates to keep all neighbors informed of the reportable part of its source tree. The present invention performs neighbor discovery using "differential" HELLO messages that report only "changes" in the status of neighbors. This results in HELLO messages that are much smaller than those of other link-state routing protocols.