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A comprehensive energy model for wireless sensor networks is provided by considering seven key energy consumption sources some of which are ignored by currently available models. We demonstrate the importance of using such a comprehensive model by comparing it to other existing energy models in terms of the lifetime of a sensor node. We use our model to evaluate energy consumption and node lifetime for a sensor network with fixed configuration and we validate this evaluation by simulation. We show that existing energy models over-estimate life expectancy of a sensor node by 30-58% and also yield an" optimised" number of clusters which is too large. We further make the following two observations: 1) the optimal number of clusters increases with the increase of free space fading energy, 2) for sensor networks with 100 sensors over an area of 10 4-10 5 [m 2], finding the optimal number of clusters becomes less important when free space fading energy is very low (less than 1670 pJ/bit/m 2), while for larger networks, on the other hand, cluster optimization is still important even if free space fading energy is low. Guidelines for efficient and reliable sensor network design as well as extension to a sensor network with rotating cluster heads are provided.