Information Centric Network (ICN) is a promising future networking architecture, while Named Data Networking (NDN) is regarded as ICN’s representative and authoritative scheme. In the recent past, applying ICN/NDN concept in mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), i.e. Named Data Mobile Ad-hoc Network (NDMANET), has attracted a plenty of research efforts. Compared to legacy IP protocol, NDN scheme is considered to be more robust and profitable to the node mobility and the dynamically changed topologies in the MANET domain. This paper focuses on NDMANET’s packet forwarding protocols, which to a large extent decides the efficiency of data dissemination and is a vital module of NDMANET. Firstly, the paper investigates and analyzes some existing packet forwarding protocols, which are widely accepted in NDMANET. On that basis, an innovative distance-aware data forwarding (DDF) protocol is elaborated for NDMANET, with the purpose of further enhancing its network performance. Comprehensive simulation experiments have been conducted and the results illustrate that the proposed DDF protocol can introduce considerable reduction in bandwidth and in energy consumption, with only slightly degrading the response ratio.