Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is infrastructure-less network that consists of a set of mobile nodes. These nodes have limited power based on their batteries. Network lifetime is one of the most important challenges facing this type of networks; motivating many researchers to investigate alternatives that prolong the network lifetime. This paper proposes a new path selection metric that considers the ratio between the minimum residual energy of all route nodes and hop count value to select a rout in MDSR routing protocol. The discovered paths are checked periodically for ensuring their availabilities using special packets called DTC. Glomosim simulator is used to compare the modified MDSR protocol with the traditional MDSR and other existing protocols as well. Simulation results showed that the proposed routing protocol outperformed the traditional MDSR protocol in terms of network lifetime, packet delivery ratio and end to end delay. Moreover, it showed improved performance over other existing protocols in terms of packet delivery ratio and network lifetime.