The recent enhancement of sensor devices, such as the Micro-Electro Mechanical Devices (MEMs) used for information collection and dissemination, has led to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Vehicles (IoV). This new paradigm overlaps with many research areas such as the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) where sensor nodes are deployed over an area to perform local computations based on information gathered from the surrounding. Virtual Backbone is a mechanism that aims at constructing a path with multi-hop from cluster-heads (CHs) to a Base Station (BS) via gateway nodes. This mechanism is efficient since it allows enhancing the reliability and prolonging the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol, denoted Multi-Hop Routing (MHR), which uses a virtual backbone to improve the network lifetime and reduce the number of lost packets. The aim of our proposition is to find the best connection between the CHs to ensure a fast and efficient backbone construction while minimizing the energy consumption. MHR uses the number of Advertisement (ADV) messages, the residual energy and the distance to the BS in the choice of the backbone’s gateways. Our simulation results show that MHR outperforms EEUC and MH-LEACH in terms of packet delivery ratio and network lifetime.