A wireless sensor network can be an effective tool for gathering data in a variety of environments. The data gathering process must be designed to conserve the limited resources of the sensors. We propose an Efficient Data GathEring (EDGE) protocol which satisfies such requirement because it avoids both flooding and periodic updating of routing packets. The tree created by EDGE is reconstructed upon node failures or the addition of new nodes. Simulation results compared to directed diffusion, DSR, AODV, and OLSR demonstrated that EDGE achieves a higher delivery ratio and shorter delay on various scenarios.