The fault node detection and recovery is essential in WSN for improving the network lifetime and node connectivity. Ensuring the tradeoff between energy consumption and node recovery is challenged due to redundant nodes. Hence, a novel approach is developed based on the objective of automatic recovery from failure, redundant node elimination, fault node replacement, and minimalizing energy consumption. In this approach, the fuzzy boosted sooty tern optimization (FBSTO) technique is proposed for fault node detection and replacement. Based on the node density and distance, the nodes are clustered. Then, the cluster head selection process can be accomplished with a fuzzy logic approach based on distance calculation, energy consumption, and Quality of service (QoS) nodes. The node replacement is carried out through cascaded movement, which minimizes energy utilization. The efficiency of the FBSTO approach is estimated with packet delivery ratio, packet loss ratio, end‐to‐end delay, and energy consumption. The proposed approach reduces the end‐to‐end delay to 10 ms for random deployment of 100 nodes. Also, the packet delivery ratio performance of the proposed approach is 143 for 100 SNs. For existing Multi‐objective Cluster Head Based Energy‐aware Optimized Routing (MCH‐EOR), Ant Lion Optimization (ALO), Particle swarm Optimization (PSO), Gray Wolf Optimization (GWO), and Genetic approach (GA), the packet delivery ratio is reduced to 130, 60, 50, and 100. Compared with the existing approaches, the proposed approach provides better performance.