Abstract Natural and artificial (human‐made) disasters have been steadily increasing all over the world, signifying the importance of providing reliable and energy friendly communication network to survivors in the aftermath of a disaster. On the other hand, low‐battery devices running optimised link state routing (OLSR) protocol often experience quick power failure which restricts their ability to communicate for a necessary period during rescue operations. To extend the lifespans and prioritise message delivery on low‐battery devices, the authors examine disaster scenario optimised link state routing (DS‐OLSR) protocol ALERT message and propose an innovative solution to prioritise messages based on the device battery energy level, leading to more energy conservation, packet delivery as well as better emotional state of survivors. An ALERT message is a novel message type added to mobile ad‐hoc network's (MANET) popular OLSR protocol for energy efficiency. The proposed DS‐OLSR Protocol and Message Prioritisation (DS‐OLSRMP) as an extension of DS‐OLSR modifies the multipoint relay mechanism and uses a prioritisation technique which classify nodes into four priority groups: Critical, High, Medium, and Low priorities. These priority groups help in prioritising both message delivery and message status notifications for devices with low battery energy. The DS‐OLSRMP was implemented in a Network Simulator, version 3.29 and compared with DS‐OLSR, OLSRv1 and OLSRv2. The simulation results show that DS‐OLSRMP performs better than DS‐OLSR, OLSRv1 and OLSRv2 in terms of energy conservation and packets delivery in the simulation of both sparse and dense network scenarios.