In industrial distributed control systems, sensors collect data from the physical environment periodically and transmit them to the actuators, which process the control operations based on the received data. For the effective operation of the control systems, the data transmitted by the sensors has to be delivered to the actuators reliably within the deadline, and if the message reception rate of the actuators becomes lower than a threshold, then the performance of the control systems drops greatly. This paper suggests a message routing protocol to transmit periodic messages reliably in a distributed control system based on wireless sensor networks. For reliable message transmission, the proposed protocol selects a routing path whose end-to-end message reception rate is the highest before transmitting data messages. The proposed protocol has the capability of maintaining a target message reception rate for each flow. To maintain the required target reception rate, each destination monitors the actual message reception rate periodically and transmits a feedback message to the source if it drops below the target reception rate. On receiving the feedback message, the source tries to find a new path which can satisfy the target rate. The performance of the proposed protocol has been evaluated using simulation and compared with other protocols in terms of the message reception rate, the message delay and delay jitter, and so on. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol has a higher message reception rate and comparable message delay and delay jitter to other protocols. The simulation results also show that the proposed protocol has an ability to adapt well to the dynamic network traffic change.