Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN); have been attracting an increasingly intensive research over the last few years. WMNs consist of end clients and mesh routers, communicate wirelessly in a multi-hop fashion. The commonly used routing protocols depend on the hop-count metric to determine the preferred route between source and destination. Due to the unpredictable behavior of the wireless medium, the need for a routing protocol that aware to the medium condition becomes a necessity. In this paper we propose a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as a metric to determine the optimum route between source and destination. Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR) is selected for the new metric. A comparison has been made between the conventional hop-count metric and SNR for the OLSR routing protocol. The network throughput, End-to-End delay and routing protocol overhead are used as a performance metrics for the comparison. The obtained results show that using SNR as a routing algorithm metric is performing better than the conventional hop-count in WMN environments. ©2009 IEEE.