Nowadays, most of the research focuses on the distributed algorithm to form the clusters in wireless sensor networks, in which the sensor nodes act autonomously to self-configure themselves with the help of the local information. However, the issues in such distributed mechanisms are (i) how to assign the time division multiple access (TDMA) schedule to collect the data from the cluster member (CM), (ii) how to distribute and balance the overall energy consumption of the cluster heads (CHs) under the circumstance of node's mobility. To overcome these problems, a cluster switched data gathering protocol (CSDGP) is proposed which ensures a uniform distribution of CHs by utilising a waiting time-based CH selection and an effective cluster switch based TDMA scheduling mechanism. The salient feature observed in the proposed CSDGP is that the migrated node has a chance to transmit the sensed data to the CH, whenever the CH has a free time slot. From the simulation results, it is proved that CSDGP provides a good performance under three different scenarios in comparison with existing protocols in terms of average energy consumption, average end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio, and control overhead. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2019