People are delimited by abundance use of wireless computing and communication devices that are connected via wireless technology in an overlay network. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained much attention in both public and research communities as they are expected to bring the communication between humans, environment, and machines to a new paradigm. Wireless networks gradually need to self-organize and become accustomed to new conditions for ease in management and operation. In this article, we have considered an application of traffic management for smart city. The implementation of sensors for such an application needs long life of sensors. Clustering of sensor nodes can be used for energy conservation in WSN. We have proposed a framework of self-organized wireless sensor network (SOWSN) implemented the algorithm for clustering of nodes based on residual energy of nodes and node distance to minimize the average energy consumption. We will also study the effect of node distance on energy consumption. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017.