Abstract: A novel deterministic directed diffusion routing protocol was proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to prolong network lifetime. The sink broadcasted its Interest periodically in flooding fashion. A node set up its gradients towards the neighbor nodes in the arrival order of Interest from them, the earlier arrival the larger gradient. The node toward by the maximum gradient was selected to form a path from the source to the sink. The node energy consumption was balanced by adjusting the energy threshold to preserve lower energy nodes from joining the path. Qualitative analysis and simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol can achieve better performance in terms of energy consumption and reliability than the directed diffusion protocol in the cases of single-sink-single-event and multi-sink-multi-event respectively, and it is easier to practical implement. Analytic discussion also illuminates that the proposed routing protocol has better performance in terms of delay and jitter.