Clustering methods are potentially the framework for power-conserving wireless sensor networks. These methods are among the most effective approaches aiming for prolonging the lifetime. Power-limited nature of the employed devices in wireless networks made the conventional clustering approaches to mainly focus on selecting cluster heads -which are the central points within a cluster- among the nodes with more remaining energy. Periodic rotation of this task -being a cluster head- between nodes leads to distribute the energy consumption. In singlehop wireless sensor network, Hot-Spot problem arises when the further cluster heads to the base station excessively utilize their energy due to the distant communications. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a layering-based clustering algorithm that aims at directly optimizing the nodes’ longevity by considering the application in which they operate and the relationship between the width of each layer and its overall lifetime. Two main types of applications are dealt with; First node dying and Last node dying applications. Analytical methods are employed to study the impacts of intra-cluster and singlehop communication traffic loads on the average layer’s lifetime that is formulated as an optimization problem.

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