Based on an autonomous algorithm, self-selection, the novel routing protocol called Self-selective routing (SSR) was proposed to support routing without the overhead of traditional ad hoc route maintenance. In this paper, we present a new routing protocol called self-selection based adaptive routing (SBAR), which is improved from the SSR protocol by using slot backoff delay time, adding expanding ring search mechanism, and designing an adaptive back-off delay time formula. Experimental results on ns-2 shows that the SBAR can reduce packet collision rate, provide higher available bandwidth and low end to end delay of data.