Mobile ad hoc networks (manets) are dynamically reconfigurable multi-hop wireless networks with no fixed infrastructure, consisting of radio-equipped mobile hosts. Each host acts as a router and moves in an arbitrary manner. Under such a network environment routing becomes a challenging task that can be significantly supported and facilitated by the exploitation of location information, as this paper argues. More specifically, after a brief introduction to routing in manets, a location discovery algorithm is proposed. Then, the paper focuses on location-aware routing and after presenting briefly the most important related protocols attempts to compare them based on a number of qualitative properties. Finally, the emergence of location aware services through the support of objectoriented middleware is discussed, a service discovery scenario based on Jini technology is proposed and important related deployment challenges are highlighted.