A prediction based energy-efficient target tracking protocol in wireless sensor networks (PET) was proposed for tracking a mobile target in terms of sensing and communication energy consumption. In order to maximize the lifetime of a wireless sensor network (WSN), the volume of messages and the time for neighbor discovery operations were minimized. The target was followed in a special region known as a face obtained by planarization technique in face-aware routing. An election process was conducted to choose a minimal number of appropriate sensors that are the nearest to the target and a wakeup strategy was proposed to wakeup the appropriate sensors in advance to track the target. In addition, a tracking algorithm to track a target step by step was introduced. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed protocol efficiently tracks a target in WSNs and outperforms some existing protocols of target tracking with energy saving under certain ideal situations.