In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET), various types of Denial of Service Attacks (DoS) are possible because of the inherent limitations of its routing protocols. Considering the Ad hoc On Demand Vector (AODV) routing protocol as the base protocol it is possible to find a suitable solution to overcome the attack of initiating / forwarding fake Route Requests (RREQs) that lead to hogging of network resources and hence denial of service to genuine nodes. In this paper, a proactive scheme is proposed that can prevent a specific kind of DoS attack and identify the misbehaving node. Since the proposed scheme is distributed in nature it has the capability to prevent Distributed DoS (DDoS) as well. The performance of the proposed algorithm in a series of simulations reveal that the proposed scheme provides a better solution than existing approaches with no extra overhead.