With ample technological developments and flourishing demand for digital assistance in daily life and work environments that goes along with it, technologies are required to derive this application domain to the subsequent level. Internet of Things (IoT) is considered as one of vision for such technologies. This paper intends to develop self adaptive whale optimization algorithm (SAWOA) for the accomplishment of energy-aware cluster head selection and clustering protocols under wireless sensor network (WSN)—based IoT. Along with the parameters like energy, distance, and delay of sensor nodes in WSN, this simulation considers both load and temperature of IloT devices. After modeling the simulation, it carries out a valuable performance analysis in terms of network efficiency, normalized energy and load and temperature of the selected cluster head. The performance analysis compares the effectiveness of proposed SAWOA over traditional artificial bee colony (ABC), genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), gravitational search algorithm (GSA), adaptive GSA (AGSA) and WOA-based cluster head selection models. The outcome from simulation model proves the successful performance of SAWOA in cluster head selection so that the lifetime of network is prolonged. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.