In this paper, the bottleneck problem in PRMC-based wireless sensor networks is studied. This problem can be solved by overlapping neighboring layers. By this way, more cluster head candidates are available for each layer and the intra-cluster communication energy can be reduced, which ultimately helps prolonging network lifetime. Through analysis and numeric results, the reasonable overlapped ranges are decided such that the energy consumption among the cluster heads of different layers is balanced. Simulation results with the selected overlapped ranges confirm that overlapping neighboring layers balances the energy consumption among cluster heads of different layers and prolongs network life time.