Abstract: In order to adapt to the space structure and environment characteristics of coal mine roadway,and improve the performance and prolong the lifetime of a network,this paper presents an energy efficient cross-layer routing mech- anism for wireless sensor network in the environmental monitoring in coal mine roadway. The authors theoretically ana- lyze the problem of unbalanced energy exhaustion among cluster heads in the whole network,and calculate the effec- tive density function (ρ(x)) which is used for cluster head selection. The authors also present a cross-layer routing scenario with the cluster heads selection strategy,which considers available link bandwidth and available queue buffer length of routing nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms other algorithms in terms of the energy balance of average node,prolongs the network lifetime and improves network throughput and packet delivery ra- tio. The EBUCR is more suitable for the monitoring in coal mine roadway.