On-demand ad hoc routing protocols broadcast control packets to establish route to destination nodes. In ad hoc networks that are formed by many mobile nodes, they generate a high number of broadcast packets, thereby causing contention, packet collision and battery power wastage in the mobile nodes. We propose an efficient route establishment method to decrease the transmission of control packets by using a neighborhood vector and controlled flooding technique. The goals are to: i) discover the shortest path with minimal control overhead, and ii) minimize the total resources consumed in message delivery. Through simulation, we demonstrate that our proposed method is especially efficient in dense ad hoc networks. In our proposed method, the number of control packets is decreased without lowering the success ratio of path discoveries according to the number of adjacent nodes. Furthermore, our proposed method adapts to the normal network conditions. The simulation results show [Section 3.4] that the proposal technique save up to 70% of control packets when the network is denser.