In this paper, first we present a performance comparison of Associativity Based Routing (ABR) and Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocols. Delay, throughput, and energy consumption are the performance metrics that are used for the comparison. ABR suffers from large routing packets size, which affects its performance. The large packet size is mainly due to the amount of information that the route discovery packets collect at each node. The impact of overhead information in routing packets on performance can be mitigated either by changing the mechanics of the protocol or by making use of the overhead information in such a way that it contributes performance improvement. We propose a technique to reduce the packet size by changing mechanics of the protocol, and evaluate the proposed technique considering delay, throughput and energy consumption. We also propose and study a scheduling mechanism that uses the overhead information in ABR routing packets to improve the performance. We refer to this mechanism as stability and neighbor-state dependent scheduling.