In wireless sensor networks (WSN) energy efficiency of routing protocols is of primary importance. Embedded with local load balancing mechanisms, the proposed L2RP protocol is a link reliability based routing protocol which aims to help source nodes to exploit the potential capabilities of their respective neighbors. As it is a reliability-oriented protocol, L2RP discards unreliable links to avoid the substantial energy cost of packet losses. Simulation results show major efficiency benefits that stem from load balancing which helps in lengthening the network lifetime while minimizing packet losses. In WSN, the choice of a routing protocol and its key parameters depends on the nature of the application and on its primary mission. Lot of works addressed routing issues with more or less effectiveness, some of which pointed out the use of the link quality indicator (LQI) as a route selection criterion (metric). In a previous work, following an experimental study, we have shown, under some conditions, the inefficiency of the LQI based routing. In this paper, we propose through L2RP a simple way to improve reliability and efficiency of the LQI based routing in WSN. We also give a comparative study of several metrics including new definitions of LQI based metrics. Simulation results show that our adaptation of the LQI metric is among the best route selection criteria regardless of the performance criterion under consideration.