Abstract
The recent technological developments have revolutionized the functioning of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)-based industries with the development of Internet of Things (IoT). Internet of Drones (IoD) is a division under IoT and is utilized for communication amongst drones. While drones are naturally mobile, it undergoes frequent topological changes. Such alterations in the topology cause route election, stability, and scalability problems in IoD. Encryption is considered as an effective method to transmit the images in IoD environment. The current study introduces an Atom Search Optimization basedClusteringwith Encryption Technique for Secure Internet of Drones (ASOCE-SIoD) environment. The key objective of the presented ASOCE-SIoD technique is to group the drones into clusters and encrypt the images captured by drones. The presented ASOCE-SIoD technique follows ASO-based Cluster Head (CH) and cluster construction technique. In addition, signcryption technique is also applied to effectually encrypt the images captured by drones in IoD environment. This process enables the secure transmission of images to the ground station. In order to validate the efficiency of the proposed ASOCE-SIoD technique, several experimental analyses were conducted and the outcomes were inspected under different aspects. The comprehensive comparative analysis results established the superiority of the proposed ASOCE-SIoD model over recent approaches.