Energy constraint of wireless sensor networks makes energy saving and prolonging the network lifetime become the most important goals of routing protocols. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Chain-based Routing Protocol (EECRP) for wireless sensor networks to minimize energy consumption and transmission delay. EECRP organizes sensor nodes into a set of horizontal chains and a vertical chain. Chain heads are elected based on the residual energy of nodes and distance from the header of upper level. In each horizontal chain, sensor nodes transmit their data to their own chain head based on chain routing mechanism. EECRP also adopts a chain-based data transmission mechanism for sending data packets from the chain heads to the base station. The simulation results show that EECRP outperforms LEACH, PEGASIS and ECCP in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, number of data messages received at the base station, transmission delay and especially energy${ imes}$delay metric.