Wireless sensor networks (WSN) play an important role in IoT (Internet of Things) as an interconnecting infrastructure. Working with a limited energy source, the vital challenge for WSN is to prolong the network lifetime as an important performance metric. Furthermore, the limitations of regular transmission technologies create localized network areas of a multi-hop fashion form that adds more constraints to enhance the network performance. Hence, the clustering strategies initially have solved these problems and received the attention of many studies, an approach using unequal clustering strategy has yielded some positive results since consumed energy gaps are avoided in regions near base stations. However, the routing strategy among cluster heads in multi-hop wireless networks is still a big challenge because of its inefficiency in energy consumption aspects. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel method that combining an unequal clustering problem and a simple multi-hop routing to prolong network life. The numerical results show that the proposed solution is more effective than other models in recent studies
