How to improve the lifetime of wireless sensor networks has become a hot issue in network industrialization. The return of information(i.e., the invalid transmission of information) is an important source of energy waste, and severely curbs the extension of network lifetime. For the problem of energy loss and imbalanced energy consumption in the classical LEACH protocol, a novel energy-balanced routing method named FA-LEACH based on forward-aware mechanism is proposed. This algorithm eliminates the effect of dead nodes and establishes the cluster head candidate set with residual energy. Based on the position and direction information of the cluster head node, the algorithm introduces the concept of pre-sensing area, establishes the index for evaluating the importance of nodes, and selects the relay nodes(i.e, sub-cluster head nodes) attached to the cluster head nodes. Through the selective transmission of information from the subcluster head nodes, the information backhaul problem is effectively solved. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is superior to LEACH, LEACH-C, and EEUC in the terms of network lifetime and energy balance. The routing protocol can effectively enhance the practicality and application of the networks.