Cluster-based wireless sensor network (WSN) can significantly reduce the energy consumption by data aggregation and has been widely used in WSN applications. However, due to the intrinsic many-to-one traffic pattern in WSN, the network lifetime is generally deteriorated by the unbalanced energy consumption in a cluster-based WSN. Therefore, energy efficiency and network lifetime improvement are two crucial and challenging issues in cluster-based WSNs. In this paper, we propose a Non-Uniform Node Distribution (NUND) scheme to improve the energy efficiency and network lifetime in cluster-based WSNs. Specifically, we first propose an analytic model to analyze the energy consumption and the network lifetime of the cluster-based WSNs. Based on the analysis results, we propose a node distribution algorithm to maximize the network lifetime with a fixed number of sensor nodes in cluster-based WSNs. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the theoretical analysis results determined by the proposed analytic model are consistent with the simulation results, and the NUND can significantly improve the energy efficiency and network lifetime.