Summary Technological advancements in the area of the Internet of Things have fostered the development of multi‐hop architectures pertaining to applications seeking large network areas. However, while exploiting such applications, the sensor devices being used are made to communicate through multi‐hop routing techniques, burdening the relay nodes. Hence, it leads to a hot‐spot problem, as the nodes passing on the data, that is, relay nodes, consume their energy at a large magnitude. To solve this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel optimized routing technique to mitigate hot‐spot problem (NORTH) for wireless sensor network (WSN)‐based IoT. We employ the tunicate swarm algorithm (TSA) to optimize the cluster‐based routing, specifically the selection of cluster head (CH) of each cluster by using some novel parameters. These parameters include energy status, a distance of a node from the sink and other nodes, load balancing, node proximity, and average energy stock of the network. We investigate two network scenarios, that is, when a sink is placed inside the network and otherwise, to give an optimized solution for every case. Further, to mitigate the hot‐spot problem, the relay node is selected in a cluster with the same mechanism as CH, which performs the task of data forwarding. The simulation analysis of NORTH reveals the supremacy of the proposed work against the recently proposed algorithms, based on various performance metrics, namely, network longevity, stability duration, throughput, and the network's remaining energy.