Journal of Cybersecurity and Information Management JCIM 2690-6775 2769-7851 10.54216/JCIM https://www.americaspg.com/journals/show/852 2019 2019 Department of Computer Science and engineering, Chandigarh University, Mohali, India Sahil Verma RCC institute of information technology, Kolkata, India Sanjukta Gain Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) encompasses a set of wirelessly connected sensor nodes in the network for tracking and data gathering applications. The sensors in WSN are constrained in energy, memory, and processing capabilities. Despite the benefits of WSN, the sensors closer to the base station (BS) expels their energy faster. It suffers from hot spot issues and can be resolved by the use of unequal clustering techniques. In this aspect, this paper presents a political optimizer-based unequal clustering scheme (POUCS) for mitigating hot spot problems in WSN. The goal of the POUCS technique is to choose cluster heads (CHs) and determine unequal cluster sizes. The POUCS technique derives a fitness function involving different input parameters to minimize energy consumption and maximize lifetime of the network. To showcase the enhanced performance of the POUCS technique, a comprehensive experimental analysis takes place, and the detailed comparison study reported the better performance of the POUCS technique over the recent techniques. 2021 2021 42 50 10.54216/JCIM.080201 https://www.americaspg.com/articleinfo/2/show/852