Hundreds and thousands of small, limited battery operated sensor nodes constitutes wireless sensor network. These type of network is used for monitoring a variety of applications. The main goal of wireless sensor network is to send the sensed information to the base station as efficiently as possible through wireless links, to maximize the network life time. Among various energy efficient routing schemes, cluster based hierarchical routing is quite efficient one. This paper improves the LEACH-CE protocol which is not suitable for multi-hop communication. This paper explores a new approach for multi-hop routing where cluster head selection and cluster formation is accomplished by LEACH-CE protocol. In the proposed approach complete network is divided into two zones i.e., near zone and far zone based on threshold distance. Far zone is further divided into different zones based on threshold distance. The cluster head belonging to near zone transmits data directly to the base station while the cluster head belonging to far zone transmits data via relay cluster head. Theoretically, proposed solution gives better results as compared to the other existing protocol such as LEACH, LEACH-C in terms of network lifetime.