Abstract: Energy limitations in wireless sensor networks have always been a vital issue. Most studies in the field of wireless sensor networks are performed to decrease electric power consumption. As a result, energy consumption is an important parameter for designing new routing protocols. LEACH protocol is a clustering algorithm that is used for routing in wireless sensor networks in order to save energy and to improve the network lifetime. In this study, a new method is proposed to improve LEACH algorithm. This method tries to select appropriate clusters by considering the distance between nodes and node residual energy to optimize energy consumption of wireless sensor networks. The proposed approach is simulated using MATLAB. The simulation results show that the proposed approach is better than the conventional LEACH algorithm and two recent LEACH-based algorithms in terms of number of nodes that saved energy. Although, this method requires more iteration to determine the number of clusters however, it satisfies the number of optimum iterations that can be proved by mathematical methods.