In a multi-hop wireless sensor network (WSN), the sensors closest to the sink tend to deplete their energy faster than other sensors, which is known as an energy hole around the sink. No more data can be delivered to the sink after an energy hole appears, while a considerable amount of energy is wasted and the network lifetime ends prematurely. This paper investigates the energy hole problem, and based on the improved corona model with levels, it concludes that the assignment of transmission ranges of nodes in different coronas is an effective approach for achieving energy-efficient network. It proves that the optimal transmission ranges for all areas is a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP), which is NP hard. The paper proposes an ACO (ant colony optimization)-based distributed algorithm to prolong the network lifetime, which can help nodes in different areas to adaptively find approximate optimal transmission range based on the node distribution. Furthermore, the simulation results indicate that the network lifetime under this solution approximates to that using the optimal list. Compared with existing algorithms, this ACO-based algorithm can not only make the network lifetime be extended more than two times longer, but also have good performance in the non-uniform node distribution.