An important characteristic of a mobile ad hoc network routing protocol is connectivity maintenance. The protocol’s ability to maintain routes and react to topology changes due to link failures affects the delay, packet loss, and throughput of real-time applications. However, the time required to recover from a link failure in the current AODV protocol is too long for real-time applications. The objective of this paper is to develop a mechanism to allow fast response to link breaks to enable real-time communications, such as Voice over IP. We propose AODVM-ALARM, an adaptive localized route maintenance mechanism, over an existing ad hoc multipath routing protocol. The mechanism dynamically monitors and maintains on-going communications by utilizing special control messages and packet analysis techniques to enable fast response to link breaks. The mechanism can recognize, respond and recover quickly from link breaks due to topology changes. AODV-ALARM has been tested in an ad hoc experimental testbed, and compared with AODV-UU and AODVM protocols. Results show that AODVM-ALARM significantly improves the response time to link failures and achieves an overall improvement in the network performance in terms of the failover delay, failover loss and throughput when compared with the previous ad hoc routing protocols. AODVM-ALARM which is easily deployable, fault tolerant and have a fast response to topology changes can be used to rapidly establish VoIP communications, playing a significant role in emergency response for disaster recovery when the network infrastructure might be broken.