Arab J Sci Eng (2014) 39:3771–3779 DOI 10.1007/s13369-014-1059-x RESEARCH ARTICLE - COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE Balancing the Network Clusters for the Lifetime Enhancement in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks Hesham Abusaimeh · Mohammad Shkoukani · Faiz Alshrouf Received: 10 November 2012 / Accepted: 28 February 2013 / Published online: 31 March 2014 © King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals 2014 Abstract The wireless sensor networks consist of large number of low cost, long battery life sensor nodes. Cluster- ing sensors into groups are improving the network lifetime and saving energy. Many approaches have been designed to cluster the networks into groups. However, few of these clus- tering algorithms have studied the numbers of the nodes of each cluster and the way of balancing them. None of these clustering algorithms consider the energy level of the wire- less sensor nodes in balancing the clusters. In this paper, we have applied a new technique to balance the number of nodes in the clusters based on the energy level of the wireless sensor nodes. This technique is compared with the default ZigBee clustering protocol to measure its performance. Keywords Balance clustering protocol · Wireless sensor network · Energy consumption · Lifetime · Cluster-tree · Cluster-head H. Abusaimeh (B ) Computer Networks Systems Department, Applied Science University, Amman 11931, Jordan e-mail: h_saimeh@asu.edu.jo M. Shkoukani · F. Alshrouf Computer Information Systems Department, Applied Science University, Amman 11931, Jordan e-mail: m.shkokani@asu.edu.jo F. Alshrouf e-mail: Faiz_Alshrouf@aau.edu.jo 1 Introduction The new self-organized wireless sensor networks (WSNs) collect the data from the places where they are deployed, shot, or scattered randomly. WSNs are used in various appli- cations such as calculating the environments’ phenomenon parameters, monitoring patients, monitoring industrial prod- ucts, controlling automated homes and factories and many other industrial and militarily applications [1, 2]. WSNs are limited networks resources via lake of storage unit, computation ability and power battery supply. There- fore, this network needs efficient utilization of all these resources. Cluster-based wireless network is a well-known technique to reduce the energy consumption of most sensors in the network by activating the cluster-heads of the clus- ters and gives the other nodes in the same clusters a rest by sending them into sleep mode as shown in Fig. 1 [3, 4]. Although, such a high-density network enhances its per- formance in terms of fault tolerance and nodes communica- tion to cover any failed path or reaching far nodes [6]. This density is painful in terms of increasing the data redundancy 123