The routing protocol is of great significance to the quality of service (QoS) of the unmanned aerial vehicle self-organizing network (FANET). The high-speed movement of nodes in FANET will bring about drastic changes in the network topology. This feature will aggravate the link interruption, resulting in a significant reduction in network QoS. This paper proposes a low routing overhead protocol based on link quality (LQLR_OLSR). It optimizes the multipoint relay (MPR) set in FANET to reduce redundant MPR nodes; Then modified the expected transmission count (ETX) based on it as a routing metric, Integrated four characteristics of forward transmission success rate, reverse transmission success rate, link packet size and link bandwidth to realize routing multipath adaptation. The OPNET simulation results show that LQLR_OLSR in FANET environment is significantly better than Global_OP_OLSR and OLSR in terms of average throughput, packet transmission success rate, routing overhead and average end-to-end delay performance.