Wireless sensor network consists of a number of power constrained sensor nodes that sense data from the environment. The collected data is directed to the base station in a harmonized way. Under such circumstances, the foremost challenges of sensor networks are limited energy, system lifetime, latency, quality of information, and limited communication bandwidth. Clustering methods enable to reuse the bandwidth and better resource allocation in order to maintain stable power control. In this paper the election of cluster head among the region cluster members is carried out through Adaptive Buffering with Fuzzy based Multilevel clustering (ABFMC). The proposed algorithm facilitates all nodes to communicate with the base station through a unique number of buffer nodes. Here, the decision based on distance factor is made by the selection of transmission through cluster head. Simulation results show that the proposed ABFMC algorithm provides better network lifetime and efficient energy distribution among the nodes. © 2020, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.