Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are solicited for many communication needs. Sensor nodes are predominantly battery powered devices. For applications like environment monitoring and defense reconnaissance, they are envisaged to be deployed unfriendly environment where it is diffcult to replace them after their deployment. This constitutes an obstacle for the use of these networks in low income countries. The effcient management of the energy of these nodes becomes a real challenge for the vulgarization of these solutions for these countries. Energy consumption of the nodes must be properly managed in order to prolong the network lifetime. Different energy-effcient have been proposed in literature over the years. Many of these solutions seek to optimize the overall energy consumption in the network. Depleting the energy of a single node may render the system ineffcient. We investigate energy-balanced routing approaches. We implement an approach based on taking into account number of foreign data flows to be supported by intermediate nodes in order to minimize their energy consumption and then extend network lifetime. This approach is compared to those taking into account intermediate nodes residual energy in the choice of the next hop to the sink.