Numerous routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have been designed in process information delivery from a source node to a destination node. In this paper, the Taguchi’s design of experiment (TDE) has been applied to investigate the performance of Destination Sequence Distance Vector (DSDV) routing protocol in MANETs. The effects of network parameters namely terrain sizes, node speeds, network sizes, transmission ranges, transmission rates, pause times and the number of maximum connections on packet delivery ratio and routing overhead in medium scale ad hoc networks have been done through simulation experiments. Through this study, we can rank these factors that may affect packet delivery ratio and routing overhead. The response performance was analyzed based on signal-to-noise ratio and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results revealed that the transmission range was the most influential factor on the packet delivery ratio, followed by terrain size and transmission rate. The network size had the greatest effect on routing overhead, followed by the transmission range.