Abstract: As mobile computing requires more computation as well as communication activities, energy efficiency becomes the most critical issue for battery-operated mobile devices. Specifically, in ad hoc networks where each node is responsible for forwarding neighbor nodes' data packets, care has to be taken not only to reduce the overall energy consumption of all relevant nodes but also to balance individual battery levels. Unbalanced energy usage will result in earlier node failure in overloaded nodes, and in turn may lead to network partitioning and reduced network lifetime. This paper presents a new routing algorithm, called Local Energy-Aware Routing (LEAR), which achieves a trade-off between balanced energy consumption and shortest routing delay, and at the same time avoids the blocking and route cache problems. Our performance study based on GloMoSim simulator shows that compared to DSR the proposed LEAR improves the energy balance 10-35% depending on node mobility.