ABSTRACT.Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are the subject of the era due to its importance and wide applications. The
last decade of research focused on how to improve its performance in terms of enlarging lifetime and better handling
network dynamics. Many WSN applications such as monitoring and reporting are time critical so, the performance of WSN
can not include lifetime only, but also other performance measures such as delay must be taken into consideration as well.
This paper focuses on the WSN network layer which includes routing techniques as a main key in high performance
applications. A routing technique based on virtual rings and genetic algorithm is proposed to shorten the round delay time.
This technique uses virtual ring features in addition to clustering methods to divide the sensors in the network into groups
contain nearby sensors. The main advantage of this proposed technique is that it maximizes the interval of the first node
failure besides obtaining a reasonable delay in forwarding data to sink through the usage of the virtual rings.