Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) consist of a group of two or more nodes, which are connected in dispersed manner for enabling wireless communications. All nodes being moveable and are dynamically connected in a random way. MANETs can be used in many applications such as: military battles, WSN, in areas where it is difficult to build wired network. Due to dynamic topology of MANET, restricted battery power, and limited capacity of wireless channels, it becomes design of routing mechanism is one of the main challenges in MANET. In general, MANETs’ routing protocols can be classified into two classes: proactive routing (e.g. DSDV) and reactive routing (e.g. AODV and DSR). Many studies showed that reactive routing protocols are outperform proactive protocols. Therefore, the presented article concerned with performance enhancement of DSR which is one of the most famous reactive routing protocols. The standard DSR is multi hop in its nature, where route selection between any two communicating nodes is only based on minimum hop count as a metric, regardless another metrics such as energy of nodes, traffic load on nodes and power transmission of packets which may have negative effects on performance of the standard DSR. This paper presents new version of standard DSR, called (APEE-DSR), through modification of both route discovery phase and route maintenance phase, in such a way that minimize energy consumption of nodes and realization of balanced traffic load of nodes, in addition to adaptation of transmission power of exchanged data packets among communicating nodes, resulting in prolong life time of nodes, thence increase life time of the routes and relative stability of network. In the proposed scheme route selection is based on two combined metrics: nodes’ energy and nodes’ traffic load. Moreover, transmission power of packets among nodes through the selected route will be adaptive. Performance evaluation and comparison between proposed scheme (APEE-DSR) and original DSR has been implemented utilizing network imitator (NS2). Results of simulation proved that performance of the proposed protocol outperform original DSR in terms of: packet delivery ratio, end to end delay, normalized overhead and energy consumption of nodes.