Clustering approaches have been used to an extensive range of issues and also in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) domain efficiently to address scalability problem. This paper proposes a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique to enhance the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. Better scalability is achieved through clustering process to make sure of even distribution of nodes into clusters and thus eliminating leftover nodes problem which will be a major cause for draining out the energy of sensor nodes and results in reduced lifetime of overall network. The Spanning tree based data routing process will ease the task of cluster heads while forwarding the data further towards base station. The proposed work is carried out in NS-2, the results show that PSO outperforms the existing techniques such as DRINA, BCDCP, OEERP, E-OEERP in terms of network lifetime, throughput, packet delivery ratio, residual nodes and packet drop count. © 2018, Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.