A Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a self-configuring network of mobile devices connected by wireless links. The communication in ad hoc network is uncertain because established route could be broken anytime. The main two reasons for route breakage are: movement of a node in the route from its neighbor's signal range and any node in the route may run out of battery. In this paper, we have proposed a scheme E-DSR that improves the route maintenance process of DSR. E-DSR uses two levels of thresholds, each of two factors: node's battery power and received RF signal power. During the time interval between these two thresholds, source node checks the freshness of the entire backup routes simultaneously and delete stale routes from its route cache. If the route cache becomes empty then source initiate a new route discovery. The advantage of E-DSR is that the time interval (T) would be zero when there is at least one fresh route in the source's route cache and T would be much less than that in DSR when there is no fresh route found. Hence, E-DSR minimizes the loss of data packets.