SummaryIn the last decades, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have appeared as an active research area owing to their high applicability in different application areas like healthcare, automation, and the military. Several issues have been encountered in the WSNs, including energy consumption, deployment of sensor nodes, routing algorithms, energy efficiency, cluster head (CH) selection, and robustness. Cluster‐based routing is one of the energy‐efficient solutions in the WSN. At the same time, the hot spot problem remains a challenging problem, which needs to be addressed in the design of energy‐efficient solutions for WSNs. Motivated by the abovementioned discussion, c The comprehensive comparison study pointed out the betterment of the FLHBA‐CMHR technique in terms of different measures. The FLHBA‐CMHR technique obtains a maximum half‐node die (HND) of 1629 nodes, while the LEACH, FUCA, URBD, DEFL, and E‐FUCA techniques attain decreased HND of 793, 1085, 1092, 1139, and 1344 nodes correspondingly.