A widespread development of mobile ad hoc networks may give a great impulse to the creation of exciting new applications in the field of ubiquitous networks. A key problem in the development of mobile ad hoc networks is the establishment of high quality, multi-hop path, which imply the use of wireless links whose quality may fluctuate greatly as a consequence of interference and propagation dynamics. Most existing ad hoc routing protocols do not distinguish the quality of the links in their routing decisions. They just consider links as available for transmissions or not existing. In this paper we present an algorithm that enables link quality-awareness in cognitive packets, which observe the quality of the links and other network metrics, and exploit the information in the establishment of robust multi-hop routes. Copyright 2004 ACM.