Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) includes many wireless mobile nodes, and higher energy consumption is the major concern in MANET. Compared to other protocols, the Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) is a superior pro-active protocol, which works on limited configuration attribute variables in the MANET. In a dynamic environment, default variables of the attribute are not suitable as per the IETF draft. Therefore, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is integrated with the OLSR protocol in this manuscript. In addition, the OPNET modeler is used to evaluate the performance of ANN based OLSR protocol, which is simulated by utilizing the MATLAB software environment. The performance measures such as Routing Overhead Ratio (ROR), End to End Delay (EED), Energy Consumption (EC), and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) are employed for analysing the protocol’s performance. The simulation result revealed that the ANN based OLSR protocol effectively increases the network lifespan and reduces EC of the MANET network. Compared to the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based Modified Ad-hoc On Demand Distance Vector (MAODV) and Prevention of Selfish Node using Hash Function (PSNHF) based AODV protocols, the proposed ANN based OLSR protocol achieved higher PDR of 99.92%, 99.90%, and 99.89% on the nodes of 80, 90 and 100.