In geographic routing, position updates and load distribution are crucial to achieve a good performance. There is a concern with load distribution when it comes to dense network where there are large number of connections and huge traffic. Load balanced, Adaptive Position Update (LAPU) routing protocol solves the problem of load distribution among paths in a network with reduced position updates occurring adaptively and next hop decisions based on node’s congestion status in geographic routing. In our proposed work, to achieve load balancing, a node selects two best nodes available to the destination based on node mobility and queue length and it divides the load among them, i.e., it transfers the packets in both paths. Parameters such as end-to-end delay of packet transmission, energy consumption, throughput, and routing overhead are considered to compare the performance of the proposed work. © 2018, The Author(s).