A mobile ad hoc network consists of wireless hosts that may move often.   Movement of hosts results in a change in routes, requiring some mechanism for determining new routes.  Several routing protocols have already been proposed for ad hoc networks. This paper suggests an approach to utilize location information (for instance, obtained using the global positioning system) to improve performance of routing protocols for ad hoc networks.  By using location information, the proposed Location-Aided Routing (LAR) protocols limit the search for a new route to a smaller “request zone” of the ad hoc network.  This results in a significant reduction in the number of routing messages.  We present two algorithms to determine the request zone, and also suggest potential optimizations to our algorithms