With the advances in wireless communication, spontaneously creating impromptu networks, self-organizing and adapting to changing conditions are becoming a reality. Due to the spontaneous nature of such self-organizing networks (SONs), dealing with communication outages needs to be inherent in the network design. For instance, research on delay-tolerant networks tries to address this issue for the case when there is no contemporaneous path between nodes. However, we argue that the steps toward SONs require more than handling a specific problem, but rather require a complete paradigm shift in the way protocols and architectures are designed. Indeed, protocols should be designed knowing that there might be a need to adapt operation not only due to communication outages but also to deal with resource constraints. If forwarding protocols are taken as an example, it is overly conservative to design algorithms that assume always high mobility or long disconnections. Furthermore, taking into account underlying mobility patterns may not be sufficient under strict resource constraints. Hence, adjusting forwarding decisions on the fly while respecting resource constraints remains an interesting challenge and is the main focus of our research.