ZigBee is a recent wireless networking technology built on IEEE 802.15.4 standard and designed especially for low-data rate and low-duty cycle applications such as home and building automation and sensor networks. One of the primary goals of ZigBee is low power consumption and therefore long-living networks. Despite this goal, current network formation and routing protocols described in the ZigBee specification do not fully address power consumption issues. In this work, we propose a distributed routing algorithm to reduce power consumption of battery-powered devices by routing the communication through mains-powered devices whenever possible and consequently increasing the overall network lifetime. The proposed algorithm works on tree topologies supported by ZigBee and requires only minor modifications to the current specification. Our ns-2 simulation results showed that the algorithm is able to reduce the power consumption of battery-powered devices significantly with minimal communication overhead. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012.