Designing of a multi-hop Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) depends upon the requirements of the underlying sensing application. The main objective of WSNs is to monitor physical phenomenon of interest in a given region of interest using sensors and provide collected data to sink. The WSN is made of a large number of energy, communication, and computational constraint nodes, to overcome energy constrains, replacing or recharging the batteries of the WSN nodes is an impossible task, once they are deployed in a hostile environment. Therefore, to keep the network alive as long as possible, communication between the WSN nodes must be done with load balancing. Time critical applications like forest fire detection, battle field monitoring demands reception of data by the sink with the bounded delay to avoid disasters. Hence, there is a need to design a protocol which enhances the network lifetime and provides information to the sink with a bounded delay. This paper will address this problem and solution. In this paper, a routing algorithm is proposed by introducing Energy Delay Index for Trade-off (EDIT) to optimize both objectives-energy and delay. The EDIT is used to select cluster heads and “next hop” by considering energy and/or delay requirements of a given application. Proposed approach is derived using two different aspects of distances between a node and the sink named Euclidean distance and Hop-count, and further prove using realistic parameters of radio to get data closest to the test bed implementation. The results aspire to give sufficient insights to others before doing test bed implementation.