Data gathering is a fundamental operation in wireless sensor networks. For the online data gathering problem, we consider the key issues of balancing the load on the nodes to achieve longer network lifetime, and that of balancing the load on the network links to achieve greater reliability in the network. We model the given network as a shortest-distance DAG D, which defines a set of parent nodes for each node that determine the minimum-hops paths from the node to a sink. Data gathering in D is accomplished using a dynamic routing approach, where each node selects a parent using a parent selection function σ to forward the sensed data, which generates a dynamic forest (D, σ) in the network. We investigate a dynamic state-based routing approach where σ is defined using the current state of the network. Based on our earlier work [1], we propose two dynamic state-based routing algorithms -MPE Routing and WPE Routing, that aim to load-balance the nodes as well as the edges of D in order to achieve longer network lifetime as well as greater disjointness. We evaluate the performance of our algorithms with respect to the three goodness measures -network lifetime, nodal load-balancing and disjointness, and compare it with two benchmark algorithms as well as existing data gathering schemes. Our simulation results show that our algorithms perform consistently better with respect to our goodness measures than the benchmark algorithms and other approaches.