Since the energy supply of a sensor node is limited, energy optimization should be considered as the key objective when studying the overall network design problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we proposed a distributed energy-efficient clustering algorithm in WSNs based on multi-hop theory. We compare the proposed algorithm with different clustering methods used in the WSNs. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has the better performances of energy-efficiency, higher throughput and low delay.