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Improving the lifetime in wireless sensor networks is important because the sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks are constrained by limited energy. The way to improve a WSN lifetime is to develop energy-efficient protocols for reducing energy consumption. One of the well-known energy-efficient methods is the clustering based algorithm which is designed for homogeneous wireless sensor networks. The clustering algorithms were also improved and applied to the heterogeneous wireless sensor networks. In this paper, an energy-efficient protocol with grouping design is proposed. The proposed method divides sensor nodes into several groups whose total energies are the same. The proposed scheme not only extends network lifetime but is also applicable to the multi-level heterogeneous wireless sensor networks.