In order to minimize the energy consumption in the discovery of the routing path, this paper introduces a novel concept of effective transmission (ET) that ensures each forwarding node is not only farther from the source node, but also nearer to the destination node with respect to its sender.An energy-aware routing protocol based on ET is proposed.It enables the energy consumption for each hop to be the least for the transmission. The simulation results show the routing protocol is effective in the performance of energy consumption comparing with some other routing protocols.