ABSTRACT During the process of discovering route in MANET, path request broadcast and path response packets are the necessary operations to locate the consistent route from the cradle point or node to the end node. In these situations, intermediate node which may or may not belong to the route discovery process will also update the route table and re-broadcast the route discovery packets to its neighboring nodes. Finally the best possible path is found which has a minimum of hopping to reach the destination. This will increase overhead and worsens routing performance in turn. The proposed Enhanced Petal Ant Routing (The EPR) algorithm offers low overhead by optimizing FANT and BANT transmissions in the route discovery process. This is a improvement from SARA and has features taken from petal routing. The algorithm is simulated on NS2, against the ACO framework called SARA and classic routing protocols such as AOMDV and AODV. The simulation results shows that EPR further reduces overhead by eliminating redundant forwarding FANT compared to other routing algorithms.