The limited energy supply of wireless sensor networks poses a great challenge for the deployment of wireless sensor nodes. In this paper, a sensor network of nodes with wireless transceiver capabilities and limited energy is considered. Clustering is one of the most efficient techniques to save more energy in these networks. Therefore, the proper selection of the cluster heads plays important role to save the energy of sensor nodes for data transmission in the network. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient data transmission by determining the proper cluster heads in wireless sensor networks. We also obtain the optimal location of the base station according to the cluster heads to prolong the network lifetime. An efficient method is considered based on particle swarm algorithm (PSO) which is a nature inspired swarm intelligence based algorithm, modelled after observing the choreography of a flock of birds, to solve a sensor network optimization problem. In the proposed energy- efficient algorithm, cluster heads distance from the base station and their residual energy of the sensors nodes are important parameters for cluster head selection and base station localization. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm improves the network lifetime and also more alive sensors are remained in the wireless network compared to the baseline algorithms in different situations. Manuscript profile