Since most ad hoc mobile devices today operate on batteries, the power consumption becomes an important issue. This paper proposes a cross-layer design of energy-aware ad hoc on-demand distance vector (CEAODV) routing protocol which adopts cross-layer mechanism and energy-aware metric to improve AODV routing protocol to reduce the energy consumption and then prolong the life of the whole network. In CEAODV, the link layer and the routing layer work together to choose the optimized transmission power for nodes and the route for packets. The link layer provides the energy consumption information for the routing layer and the routing layer chooses route accordingly and conversely controls the link layer to adjust the transmission power. The simulation result shows that CEAODV can outperform AODV to save more energy. It can reduce the consumed energy by about 8% over traditional energy-aware algorithm. And the performance is better when the traffic load is higher in the network.