Wireless smart metering is one of the modern innovative technologies aimed for energy sustainability. Smart meters installed at homes can supply electricity companies with power usage statistics in real time for reliable energy supply. Ad-hoc network is considered a potential candidate for deployment of smart metering communication network. Ad-hoc routing using classical hop count criterion proves to be inefficient for smart metering scenario. Thus a new multi metric on-demand ad-hoc routing protocol is proposed for reliable communication in resource constrained smart meters. Simulation results presented in this paper indicate our protocol outperforms classical Ad-hoc routing protocol (AODV) for smart metering deployment. © 2013 IEEE.