In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been an interesting and important research area. Many routing protocols for WSNs have been designed to achieve high energy-efficiency, high reliability, low overhead, etc. However, few routing protocols for WSNs were designed to minimize the communication delay, which is one of the most important requirements for applications of WSNs, such as real-time surveillance systems. In this paper, a novel routing protocol for WSNs coined Delay-Minimum Energy- Aware Routing Protocol (DERP) is proposed for guaranteeing real-time communication. Additionally, energy-efficiency that prolongs the network lifetime is fully considered. Performance analyses and simulation results show that the DERP has much better performance than Directed Diffusion [2] and Rumor Routing [5] in terms of both communication delay and network lifetime.