Routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks experience high control overhead due to frequent path breaks that occur due to mobility of nodes, which leads to flooding of control packets throughout the network. We propose a preferred link based routing protocol that reduces flooding of control packets by selectively allowing some nodes to forward the packets using a preferred list. We propose two algorithms to compute the preferred list. The first algorithm computes the preferred list based on neighbor's degree. The second algorithm computes the preferred list based on stability information. Simulation results illustrate their performance and demonstrate their good behavior compared to other protocols. They also show that the stability based algorithm finds more stable paths while the neighbor's degree based algorithm has least control overhead.