Most existing message-oriented middleware for mobile networks rely on infrastructure or assume the existence of reliable and continuous connections among communicating entities. These schemes do not take advantage of cross-layer optimizations. Publish/subscribe middleware has been widely used to provide asynchronous communication functionality in distributed application environments. Due to node mobility and frequent node disconnections, asynchronous publish/subscribe message middleware is a proper communication model for mobile ad hoc networking environments. In this paper, we propose a MOBility-aware and CROSS-layer based middleware (MOBCROSS) for mobile ad hoc networks. MOBCROSS is based on the publishing and subscription of topics. The main features of MOBCROSS are mobility awareness, network reconfiguration, and cross-layer interaction support. The performance of the middleware is evaluated in a simulation environment. The simulation results indicated that MOBCROSS achieves a good packet delivery ratio and low overhead.