“…In practice, each MN sends the sensed data to its CH, which subsequently sends it to BS through one-hop or next hop based multi-hop transmission. Clustering protocol is thought to be an apt technique for nodes in WSNs to save energy, because clustering structure plays a major role on improving network lifetime due to balanced and efficient node energy usage [13,14,17,24]. Moreover, the clustering structure in WSN has further advantages such as topology management, resource management, data aggregation and routing etc.…”