Abstract: Energy problem is very important in Ad hoc networks due to energy-constrained. In this paper, a traffic balanced route setup scheme, called TBDB, is presenred to improve energy efficiency. TBDB routing setup scheme decides whether to reply the route request by the connected flows of the node. Both of them have own threshold values and make routing decisions by the status of the node. The threshold values can be obtained by the normalized throughput values under saturated status. Analysis and simulation results show that both of them balance the energy consumption and the traffic of networks, improve the energy efficiency greatly, and decrease the average end to end delay.