In wireless sensor, networks the sensor nodes gather information and send the information to a base station periodically. Some important messages need to be broadcasted to all nodes. Data gathering and broadcasting are important operations that consume significant amounts of battery power. Due to the limited battery life, energy efficiency is becoming a major challenging problem in these power-constrained networks. Chain-based protocols construct a transmission chain connecting all nodes to save energy dissipation of data transmission. In this paper, we first review several existing chain-based protocols. We then present our multiple-chain scheme which outperforms the existing ones in the sparse-node distribution case. Furthermore, we develop an energy-efficient chain construction algorithm which uses a sequence of insertions to add the least amount of energy consumption to the whole chain. It consumes less transmission power compared to the closest neighbor algorithm.