The energy of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is very limited because battery is used for power supply in nodes normally.Therefore, the key issue that needs to be solved,is to improve the energy efficiency and prolong the lifetime of networks.In some practical applications of linear WSNs,due to the particularity of the monitoring environment and objects,the location of the monitoring points that is not in random distribution is fixed in advance, and this results in the limitation of applicability for the existing linear routing and the nodal arranging scheme with variable distances. Therefore, a grouped multihop routing algorithm based on equal distance, named GMRED, is proposed.The energy consumption mathematical model of the networks is constructed, and the network average energy is determined by the network length,the number of nodes and the groups. How to solve the problem of the group numbers when the network has minimum average energy is discussed. Finally, the Matlab software is used for simulation and analysis.The results show that,compared with the singlehop routing algorithm,the multihop routing algorithm,and the clustering multihop routing algorithm,the GMRED has the minimum average energy consumption and the maximum network lifetime because it has no cluster head.