All mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) exhibit versatile behaviour in its topology because of node mobility factor. In theory, TCP happens to be a transport layer protocol designed to provide a reliable end-to-end delivery of data over unreliable networks. But in reality, TCP encounters some challenges in multi-hop ad hoc networks especially route failures and so congestion. To address this problem previously, contention detection using congestion window adaptation (CWA-CD) procedures are designed and implemented to handle route failures. Its performance is not up to the mark because of the complexity encountered in detecting the contention variations from the round-trip time delays. So for a robust and better network performance, we propose to use candidate list generation algorithm for packet forwarding with congestion control by contention control (4C) method. The algorithm involves constant updates of location specifics for every small intervals of time and steps to sort out the forwarding list that aids communication. As a result, nearest nodes or routers participate in data transmission and this improves network performance and controls the congestion. A practical implementation of the proposed system validates the claim in terms of efficiency and fairness. © Springer India 2016