Abstract. This paper addresses the issue of minimizing the routing delay in ad hoc on-demand routing protocols through optimizing the Time-to-Live (TTL) interval for route caching. An analytical framework is introduced to compute the expected routing delay when the source node has a cached route with a given TTL value. Furthermore, a numerical method is proposed to determine the optimal TTL of a newly discovered route cached by the source node. We present simulation results that support the validity of our analysis.