Environment sustainability, energy efficiency and computational reduction of computation time are recent stressing issues for the information and communication technologies (ICTs). Energy efficiency (EE) in particular is accounted for practical use of device to device (D2D) communications which is optimistic, and alternative architectural network especially for the cases where the infrastructure based communication is not possible. As a consequence, resource allocation for D2D communication plays a key role to address the issues related to battery lifetime and application quality of services (QoS). In this paper, a novel multi-hop routing is proposed to increase the energy efficiency of the D2D communication systems. In order to obtain a plausible solution, a combinatorial optimization is formulated. The purpose of this problem formulation is to achieve improved energy efficiency, throughput rate, resource utility, and packet delivery ratio as well as to reduce the computation cost. Network simulation demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed routing as compared to other existing techniques. © 2013 IEEE.