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Effective link quality estimation is a vital issue for reliable routing in wireless networks. This paper studies the performance of expected transmission count (ETX) under different traffic loads. Although ETX shows good performance under light load, its performance gets significantly worse when the traffic load is high. A broadcast packet storm due to new route discoveries severely affects the link ETX values under high traffic load, which makes it difficult to find a good path. This paper presents the design and implementation of a variation of ETX called high load - ETX (HETX), which reduces the impact of route request broadcast packets to link metric values under high load. We also propose a reliable routing protocol using link quality metrics, which is called link quality distance vector (LQDV). We conducted the evaluation of the performance of three metrics - HETX, ETX and minimum hop-count. The simulation results show that HETX improves the average route throughput by up to 25% over ETX under high traffic load. Minimum hop-count has poor performance compared with both HETX and ETX at all of the different traffic loads. Under light load, HETX and ETX show the same performance.