Object tracking is widely referred as one of the most interesting applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This application is able to detect and track objects and report information about these objects to a central base station.One of the major drawbacks in the current research in WSNs is the quality of the data reporting where the major research focus is dedicated to localization of objects; however, few of these works were concentrated on the datareporting. An efficient data reporting algorithm for object tracking in WSNs is proposed in this paper. The main objective of this paper is to enhance the WSN lifetime by achieving both minimum energy and balancing such consumption in sensor nodes during reporting operation. Furthermore, in our model, the enhancement of network reliability is considered. Finally, it reduces the effects of congestion by sufficiently utilizing the under loaded nodes to improve the network throughput. This paper formulates the object tracking problem in large-scale WSN into 0/1 integer linear programming problem, and then proposes a reliable energy balance traffic aware approach to solve the optimization problem. From the obtained simulation results, the proposed solution has proved to be able to enhance the network performance in network lifetime, throughput, end-to-end delay, energy balance, and complexity for both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. energy distribution among sensor nodes, which may cause holes in the area surrounding the sink node. Such holes may significantly affect the network lifetime. 7,8 Hence, balanced energy consumption should be considered beside energy awareness when designing energy-efficient routing technique. 6,7 Providing reliable data transmission in WSNs is a challenge task because of the dynamic nature of wireless communication links and unstable channel conditions. 9-12 The data transfer, which is the primary purpose in WSNs, is affected by the loss of data packets. So, it is essential to reduce packet loss in WSNs to enhance network throughput and energy efficiency. Consequently, designing a routing technique that can give priority to reliable transmission is highly needed.Congestion in WSNs negatively affects the network performance; namely, extreme decrease in throughput and increase in the packet delay and energy consumption. Therefore, the congestion control is a crucial issue in WSNs. Considering the memory constraints of sensor nodes in WSNs, congestion can cause buffer overflow. As a consequence, such buffer overflow problem may lead to loss of important information, more energy wastage, and delay in the arrival of data packets to sink node. Thus, this severely reduces the network lifetime and efficiency. Therefore, in WSN, considering buffer space in routing protocols design is highly required. 13 Object tracking is widely referred as the most interesting applications of WSNs due to its wide real-life applications like wildlife monitoring 14,15 and military intrusion detection. 16 The object tracking process consists of 2 critical...