Mobile ad hoc network is a self-configuring network in which all participating nodes are mobile and consist of limited channel bandwidth and energy. Mobile devices are battery operated, and energy efficiency is a major issue for battery-operated devices in mobile ad hoc networks. Routing data packets from source to destination is the challenging task in mobile ad hoc networks due to node mobility and dynamic topology change in the network. Link failure or node energy depletion causes re-routing and establishing a new route from the source node to destination node which consumes extra node energy, reduces connectivity of the network and early partition of the network. Energy-related parameters consideration in routing is an important solution to enhance network lifetime. Several better performing routing schemes are presented and implemented for MANETs. Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol is one which performs well among similar routing protocols for MANET. AODV route selection base on either lowest hop-count or fresh sequence number. Many enhancements to AODV are proposed, which represents a better performance in comparison with original protocol. However, in a large network different paths to the destination could be found with the same hop-count. When efficiency is deliberated for those paths in quickly data transmission, each path performance varies in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio due to the mobility of the nodes in the network. AODV routing protocol and enhancements suggested by other researchers do not give attention to such cases, and this paper proposes Hop-count and Node Energy based Routing Protocol (HNERP) which uses a multi-function routing strategy that incorporates with hop-count and node energy while making the routing decision. The proposed protocol is simulated by using NS2 and results show that HNERP performs better in term of packet delivery ratio and throughput, moreover it increases network lifetime and reduces end-to-end delay
