Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is the direct application of mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) in which the nodes represent vehicles moving in a city or highway scenario. The deployment of VANET relies on routing protocols to transmit the information between the nodes. Different routing protocols that have been designed for MANET were proposed to be applied in VANET. However, the real-time implementation is still facing challenges to fulfill the quality of service (QoS) of VANET. Therefore, this study mainly focuses on the well-known MANET proactive optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol. The OLSR in VANET gives a moderate performance; this is due to its necessity of maintaining an updated routing table for all possible routes. The performance of OLSR is highly dependent on its parameter. Thus, finding optimal parameter configurations that best fit VANET features and improve its quality of services is essential before its deployment. The harmony search (HS) is an emerging metaheuristic optimization algorithm with features of simplicity and exploration efficiency. Therefore, this paper aims to propose an improved harmony search optimization (EHSO) algorithm that considers the configuration of the OLSR parameters by coupling two stages, a procedure for optimization carried out by the EHSO algorithm based on embedding two popular selection methods in its memory, namely, roulette wheel selection and tournament selection. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach has achieved the QoS requirement, compared to the existing algorithms.