Quality of service (QoS) enhancement is one of the prominent research areas in a mobile ad hoc network in which a variety of routing protocols is introduced. However, those routing protocols do not support efficiently, the multiple routes in the network, as congestion occurs owing to multiple routes. Hence, the infrastructure-less and dynamic nature of the mobile ad hoc network (MANET) demands a new set of networking strategies to improve the QoS. In this paper, a priority aware (PA) mechanism is implemented by assigning priority in accordance with their data rates in dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol in order to enhance the QoS for MANET. Five different connections are considered, and the performance parameter of the network such as throughput, packet delivery ratio (PDR), and end-to-end delay (EED) is estimated for the proposed priority aware DSR (PA-DSR) protocol. From the simulation, it is observed that the proposed PA-DSR protocol performs better than the DSR protocol due to its rate cutting mechanism.