Energy efficiency is especially important for the cluster of the wireless sensor network (WSN). This paper studies how to increase availability and survivability of WSN by selecting a suitable cluster head. For this purpose, we propose a hybrid relative distance based clustering scheme (HRDCS), to promote the efficiency of energy utilization. In HRDCS, both the relative distance and the residual energy are taken into consideration for cluster head selection. Simulation results present that HRDCS has better performance than the well-known LEACH scheme.