Ad hoc networks are useful for providing communication support where no fixed infrastructure exists or the deployment of a fixed infrastructure is not economically profitable, and movement of communicating parties is allowed. Therefore, such networks are designed to operate in widely varying environments, from military networks to low-power sensor networks and other embedded systems. Frequent topology changes caused by node mobility make routing in ad hoc wireless networks a challenging problem.In this paper, we propose an optimization technique, which we refer to as GDSR, a reactive protocol that makes use of DSR scheme and the Global positioning system (GPS). As opposed to the DSR, protocol our GDSR scheme consists of propagating the route request messages only to the nodes that are further away from the query source. We discuss the algorithm, its implementation and present an extensive simulation and experimental results to study its performance. We also present a comparative study of GDSR protocol with the existing DSR protocol. Our results clearly indicate that the GDSR protocol outperforms the DSR protocol by significantly decreasing the number of route query packets thereby increasing the efficiency of the network load. Further more, we show that a careful GPS screening angle is an important factor in the success of GDSR ad hoc routing protocol.