The characteristic that nodes can enlist into the network topology freely and independently without any fixed infrastructure makes mobile Ad hoc networks (MANET) widely used in various environments such as disaster rescue, battlefield and so on. Conventional mobile Ad hoc routing protocols usually concentrate on the constrained condition of ‘shortest path’ with minimum hops measurement. However, related researches show that the path with minimum hops can’t provide the minimum end to end delay guarantee. Moreover, recently, Ad hoc network is required to support the delay-sensitive traffic. So the reduction of the end to end delay is a new challenge for Ad hoc networks. To this point, this paper mainly focuses on the node delay and a cross-layer method is used to predict the end-to-end delay. Finally, a new routing protocol Delay Oriented Adaptive Routing (DOAR) is presented, which is based on a ‘minimum prediction of delay’ mechanism. Simulation results show that the derived path length in the proposed DOAR protocol is slightly higher than that of Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol, but it can significantly reduce the average end-to-end delay in both static and mobile scenarios.