Recent work in mobile ad hoc networks, simply MANETs, has drawn attention to the mobility capability of each node. In [5], it is proved that the optimal positions of the relay nodes along a single active flow must lie entirely on the line between the source and destination with each node spaced evenly along such a line. Based on this, we propose two distributed schemes to control the relay nodes in MANETs to approach their optimal positions in the local relative coordinate system, one using one-hop neighborhood and the other using two-hop neighborhood. Unlike the one presented in [5] using only one-hop neighborhood, our methods have no oscillation problem and will converge more quickly. To reduce the overhead in synchronization, outdated neighborhood (lagging by one round of information exchange and update) is used in our two-hop neighborhood based approach. The simulation results shows the substantial improvement on the speed of achieving the optimal configuration and the total mov...