Abstract: Packet forwarding presents a difficult challenge in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) due to mobility, dynamic topology and lack of centralized management. Misbehavior due to selfishness or malice and lack of cooperation among nodes severely degrades the performance of the network. Most of the ad hoc routing protocol assumes that all the nodes are reliable and cooperative which is not true. Implementing security mechanisms including cryptographic techniques are overhead intensive and does not guarantee in performance improvement. In this study, an improved Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Nearest Neighbor Reputation (NNR) AODV is proposed. The focus in this research is to improve the performance of the network using reputation factors for route discovery. Another advantage of the proposed mechanism is enhanced security over the existing security mechanism.