LEACH is a classical routing protocol in wireless sensor networks. The main drawbacks of this protocol are not considering the factor of residual energy of sensor nodes and not utilizing multi-hop transmission to save nodes’ energy. This paper proposes a energy-balanced layered routing protocol (EBLRP). With the modification of cluster head selection mechanism, EBLRP protocol increases the probability that nodes with high residual energy are selected as cluster heads. Moreover, EBLRP protocol designs a mechanism of multi-hop route selection. This mechanism takes the factors of node distance and residual node energy to calculate CRI(Candidate Route Index), and then uses CRI to select proper next hop route nodes. The computer simulation results show that EBLRP protocol has obvious advantages to LEACH in the aspects of throughput and energy utilization efficiency.