Organizing sensor nodes into a clustered architecture is an effective method for load balancing and prolonging the network lifetime. However, a serious drawback of the clustering approach is the imposed energy overhead caused by the "global" clustering operations in every round of the Global Round-Based Policy (GRBP). To mitigate this problem, this work proposes a Hierarchical Clustering-task Scheduling Policy (HCSP), which triggers node-driven clustering as opposed to GRBP's time-driven clustering. Based on HCSP, each cluster is reconfigured only once at each local super round. Therefore, the cluster reconfiguration frequency varies on-demand. However, in order to refresh the entire network structure, global clustering is performed at the end of every global hyper round. Accordingly, HCSP aims to achieve a more flexible, energy-efficient, and scalable clustering-task scheduling than that of GRBP. Energy consumption calculations and extensive simulations show the effectiveness of HCSP in saving energy, and thus in prolonging the network lifetime.

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