The performance of ad hoc networks is particularly influenced by the broadcast storms when the nodes are moving at a high speed in the network. Frequent change in the topology of the network can easily lead to interruption of the route. During searching the route, the broadcast forwarding RREQ (route request packet) mechanism is applied to the traditional AODV routing protocol, leading to broadcast storms. In addition, the traditional routing protocol cannot adapt to the high-speed movement of the nodes due to that the least hop is just used as the route selecting. In this study, an improved AODV routing protocol is proposed. Firstly, the data forwarding probability based on the number of local neighbors is calculated during the route initiation. Secondly, according to the cross-layer design, the link weight based on the speed of the nodes movement is used to select route. The simulation results with NS2 show that the improved routing protocol can be applied to the high-speed mobile networks due to higher delivery ratio of data packets and less end-to-end transmission delay.