In a large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), designing of an energy efficient data gathering protocol has become a challenging research issues. This is due to fact that each sensor node is generally equipped with limited energy resource. In the literature, clustering-based technique for data gathering has been proved very efficient in terms of energy saving. Although, it is pointed out in the literature that design of an energy-balanced clustering for maximizing the network lifetime of WSNs is a NP-hard probl…