Although in recent years many excellent works have been done on resolving the routing problem in ad hoc networking systems, the energy issue in route maintenance has been greatly ignored. Due to movement of mobile hosts, the energy consumption rate of a route may change with time. In this paper, we propose the distance-based route maintenance (DBRM) scheme in which a handoff mechanism is designed for switching the nodes in route maintenance to minimize the energy consumption rate. In addition, in DBRM, mobile hosts in a group may switch between different states of operations to conserve energy. In the simulation experiments, we have shown that the amount of energy conserved from using DBRM is significantly larger than both the IEEE standard 802.11 with fixed listen interval, and the power management scheme using GAF with random listen interval.