Previous studies have focused on energy-efficient routing protocols to prolong the network lifetime. These protocols can be categorized into direct, multi-hopped and clustering routing protocols. Some protocol may be better than the other depending on the determination of sensing range, availability of compression or coalescing, and variety of sensor mechanics etc. The sensor nodes located in different tiers (hop count away from the base station) may bear different communication responsibilities, e.g. forwarding the data generated by some other distant nodes from the base station. In this paper, we propose an analytic tier-based quantized model to simulate the operations of clustering routing protocols to evaluate the energy consumption of network operations. From the analytic results by considering the impact of range setting, the energy consumption of the total networks as well as the sensors in different tiers can be derived. With the knowledge of the load distribution and energy consumption of sensors in networks, routing protocols can be developed or adjusted properly to prolong the network lifetime and enhance the network availability.