A mobile adhoc network (MANET) is a network that comprises mobile devices positioned in various places functioning without any central administration. Routing in MANET plays a vital role when the data packet (DP) is sent from source to destination. In order to improve the routing stability in MANET, resource utilization (i.e., energy and bandwidth) has to be controlled. An effective firefly resource-optimized routing (FFROR) technique controls resource utilization and improves routing stability during data packet (DP) transmission in MANET. Initially, in FFROR, the firefly resource optimization (FFRO) algorithm generates the population of fireflies (i.e., mobile nodes). It calculates the light intensity of every firefly based on objective functions (i.e., minimum energy consumption and minimum bandwidth utilization). The FFRO algorithm ranks fireflies according to the light intensity and finds the best resource-optimized mobile node (MN) to send the DP to the destination. This, in turn, helps in finding the resource-optimized mobile nodes and choosing the route path for sending the DP to the destination. The proposed FFROR technique uses the FFRO algorithm to increase routing stability and throughput. The simulation is carried out to analyze the performance of proposed FFROR techniques with parameters such as energy consumption, bandwidth availability, routing stability, and throughput.