Node clustering and data aggregation are popular techniques to reduce energy consumption in large Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Cluster based routing is always a hot research area in wireless sensor networks. Classical LEACH protocol has many advantages in energy efficiency, data aggregation and so on. However, determining number of clusters present in a network is an important problem. Conventional clustering techniques generally assume this parameter to be user supplied. There exist very

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... techniques that can solve the problem of automatic detection of number of clusters satisfactorily. Some of these techniques rely on user supplied information, while others use cluster validity indices. In this paper, we proposed a rather simple method to identify the number of clusters that can give satisfactory results. Proposed method is compared with classical LEACH protocol and found to be giving better results.