In general, mobile nodes operate with limited batter power which needs to be fairly utilized in order to perform network functioning activities such as routing, increasing network lifetime and network connectivity etc., Many protocols have been proposed to minimize energy consumption rate of nodes to maximize the network functioning without degrading the performance too much. This paper has proposed a signal strength and residual power based optimum Transmission Power Routing approach which use variable transmission power model with measured Received Signal Strength and low residual power parameters to achieve energy efficiency, and to increase the network lifetime and connectivity. The ns-allinone-2.34 simulator was installed in Fedora 15 operating system and has been used for implementing the proposed approach. The results were compared with Energy Consumption Routing (ECR) and Max-Min Battery Cost Routing (MMBCR), which showed that the proposed approach offered better performance than other protocols in terms of energy consumption rate, network lifetime and end to end delay metrics. © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.