Increasing the life span and system throughput in wireless sensor networks (WSN) are vital objectives because of the energy limitations in WSNs. Routing protocols are implemented to balance the traffic flow between the nodes in the network when a source node requests to send data to a destination. The optimal route is chosen by the routing protocol using specific rules and parameters, i.e. routing metrics. This paper presents a combination of route choice metrics aimed for mobile WSN applications. The combined metric is based on two hardware based information, the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and the neighbor node residual energy. Simulation results show that the proposed metric improves the network performance in terms of energy budget and increases the system throughput by up to 27 over the hop count metric and 37 over Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and Expected Transmission count (ETX) metrics in a mobile wireless sensor network environment. © 2013 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. - All rights reserved.