ABSTRACT In recent days, due to the wide verities of applications of Wireless Sensor Networks, it gets recognition from research communities. As the sensor nodes are operated through limited battery capacity, how to utilise the battery power or energy in an optimum way is a major concern. In this paper, we have addressed the energy issue of wireless sensor networks. We have developed an energy-efficient routing protocol. This paper proposes the Novel Elite group concept where the cluster-head selection process is restricted to only a few high-energy nodes rather than all nodes in the network, which substantially reduces the number of cluster-head selection overhead in every iteration, decreases the energy consumption and increases network lifetime. Our method is compared with three well-known routing protocols, i.e. EECRP (Energy Efficient Centroid-Based Routing Protocol) protocol, NCBR (New Cooperative Balancing Routing Protocol) and Mod-LEACH (Modified low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy Protocol). We have conducted a simulation in NS-2 simulator. We have computed various network quality parameters like Throughput, transmission delay, analysis of the number of dead nodes (reciprocal of alive nodes) and energy dissipation with respect to the number of simulation rounds. The simulation results show that our proposed methodology outperforms the rest of the protocol.