Abstract. We introduce an object-oriented referencing abstraction to express coordination between objects hosted on mobile devices interconnected by a wireless ad hoc network. On the one hand, we notice that the most popular communication paradigms for mobile ad hoc networks, such as publish/subscribe and tuple space architectures, promote loose coupling of collaborating participants. On the other hand, the paradigm in which many applications are developed is objectoriented, and traditional object referencing abstractions typically lack the beneficial loose coupling properties of aforementioned paradigms. This paper proposes to close the paradigmatic gap between an object-oriented language and its distributed communication infrastructure by introducing ambient references: loosely-coupled remote object references designed for mobile ad hoc networks.