Geographic routing is one of the most widely used routing strategies in large-scale wireless sensor networks (WSN). With location-based routing, small, cheap and resource constrained nodes can perform the routing function without the need of complex computations and large amount of memory space. In the traditional approach, nodes advertise their availability to update the routing table. We eliminate this to reduce energy consumption. We introduce Modified Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) routing protocol for efficient communication among sensor nodes, which identifies optimal route based on energy utilization. The implementation of GPSR in sensor networks faces many challenges due to limited memory and battery energy on each node, frequent change of network topology and unreliable infrastructure. Our Modified-GPSR approach results in near-optimal communication cost across the network. The simulation results prove that the energy and delay in minimized and substantially increases the network lifetime of sensor node. The proposed protocol outperforms the existing routing protocol for WSNs. © 2011 IEEE.