A wireless sensor network is emerging technology and intelligent wireless communication paradigm that is dynamically aware of its surrounding environment. It is also able to respond to it in order to achieve reliable and efficient communication. The dynamical cognition capability and environmental adaptability rely on organizing dynamical networks effectively. However, optimally clustering the cognitive wireless sensor networks is an NP-complete problem. The objective of this paper is to develop an optimal sensor network design for maximizing the performance. This proposed Ranking Artificial Bee Colony (RABC) is developed based on Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) with ranking strategy. The ranking strategy can make the much better solutions by combining the best solutions so far and add these solutions in the solution population when applying ABC. RABC is designed to adapt to topological changes to any network graph in a time. We can minimize the total energy dissipation of sensors to prolong the lifetime of a network to balance the energy consumption of all nodes with robust optimal solution. Simulation results show that the performance of our proposed RABC is better than those of previous methods (LEACH, LEACH-C, and etc.) in wireless sensor networks. Our proposed method is the best for the 100 node-network example when the Sink node is centrally located.