The rapid growth in wireless technology is enabling the variety of advances in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). By providing the sensing capabilities and efficient wireless communication, WSNs are becoming important factor in day to day life. WSNs have many commercial, industrial and telecommunication applications. The efficient use of available energy is one of the major issues in wireless sensor network. The battery life of sensor nodes should be long enough to decrease the maintenance cost. The multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are used for solving two or more objective problems. In this paper, we suggest non-dominated sorting of solutions of multi-objective problems using multiobjective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA), called as non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). The primary objective of this paper is prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks. The energy consumption in the network is optimized such that lifetime of network is increased. The simulation results show that NSGA-II provides better solution to select cluster head. The comparison of NSGA-II with well-known energy efficient algorithm LEACH shows, the proposed system can increase the network lifetime four to five times more than LEACH. © 2006-2017 Asian Research Publishing Network (ARPN).