Abstract--On-demand routing protocols for ad hoc networks reduce the cost of routing in high mobility environments. However, route discovery in on-demand routing is typically performed via network-wide flooding, which consumes a substantial amount of bandwidth. In this paper, we present bypass routing, a local recovery protocol that aims to reduce the frequency of route request floods triggered by broken routes. Specifically, when a broken link is detected, a node patches the affected route using local information, which is acquired on-demand, and thereby bypasses the broken link. We implemented SLR (Source Routing with Local Recovery) as a prototype of our approach. Simulation studies show that SLR achieves efficient and effective local recovery while maintaining acceptable overhead.