Reactive routing protocols for MANETs have outperformed the proactive protocols as they incurred less overhead for maintaining routing information. Reactive protocols working "on demand" principle rely on the flooding of route request (RREQ) packets for route discovery. This flooding results in problems such as; "RREQ storm", energy consumption of nodes and bandwidth consumption of shared channel. Hence, usability of reactive protocols is under scanner. This paper suggests Received signal strength (RSS) based gossip flooding approach that modifies the RREQ rebroadcast mechanism of AODV. Experimental results show that RSS based gossip with probability p=0.66 reduces the RREQ rebroadcast by 15%, without adversely affecting the network performance in terms of connectivity, throughput and PDR, or end-to-end delay.