Aiming to enhancing the QoS of named data mobile ad hoc network (NDMANET), this paper derived an innovative node activeness based packet forwarding (NAPF) strategy dealing with the performance impact caused by MANET’s time varying topology. The proposed NAPE strategy periodically calculates and updates the activeness of all networking nodes, and utilizes nodes of higher activeness to forward (and store) the received Interest and Data packets. A simulation program was developed on the basis of the open sourced NS3/ndnSIM framework. Comparative performance evaluation experiments have been carried out for the default flooding, the shortest path routing as well as the proposed NAPF strategies. The experimental results indicate that, in the medium and high dynamic MANET scenarios, by reasonably increasing the storage consumption on node, the NAPF strategy can keep the average request delay relatively low, can achieve higher request responding ratio, and can consume much less network bandwidth.