Aiming at adapting broadcasting routing request message for on-demand routing maintenance in wireless ad hoc network and inducing much additional overhead, a Flooding-Controlled Dynamic Routing (FCDR) protocol was proposed. FCDR limits flooding within two hops of primary routing to decrease routing maintenance overhead and repair failed primary routing quickly, and then service stability. The message transmission efficiency of routing maintenance was analyzed. The analytical result shows that the efficiency drop rapidly with path length increment between source node and destination under the circumstance of no flooding-controlled. By contrast, FCDR has better efficiency and its advantage is more prominent with path length increment between source node and destination.