Abstract: Combined with the virtual cell ideology, a new energy efficient routing protocol of LEACH is proposed in the paper, which is based on the question of numerous redundancies with data collecting in nodes, unreasonable of the cluster head election and imbalance of energy consumption in LEACH protocol. The protocol adopts the virtual cell to divide the whole monitoring area, and select active work node as the candidate cluster head nodes in each grid. It gives full consideration of surplus energy and survival number of nodes in the cell to elect the cluster. Simulation results show that this improved routing protocol better than LEACH protocol on the cluster-head nodes selection, and it can extend the survival time of the network, and makes the energy consumption more balanced.