A Secure IOT‐Based Cluster Formation and Optimal Path Selection Using Fuzzy Rules and Metaheuristic Optimization

IoT is the most valuable and trending technology in recent times. It is an embedded technology which comprises different things or objects. Mostly, it is applicable in the network field. Due to the inclusion of several IoT nodes, there might occur computational complexity, delay, packet losses, and consume more energy. So, to overcome these issues, we propose a novel Mutual authentication with less computational complexity for secure communication in IoT nodes. The Parallel Advanced Encryption Standard with Cipher Block Chaining (PAES‐CBC) algorithm used for encryption reduces the ciphertext size and computational time to yield a higher level of security to the IoT nodes. The Physically Unclonable Function (PUF) serves as a crucial element to the cryptography concept by securing the secret ID and key of the IoT node generated by the trusted authority. ANY attack that takes place in the PUF will permanently disrupt the operation and serve no purpose to the attacker. The proposed work exploits the LFD‐HGSO algorithm, which is used in the formulation of IoT clusters and optimal selection of the cluster head and reduces the computational complexity. The optimal routing selection can reduce the traffic in the network and packet loss. Thus, our proposed work ensures a high packet delivery ratio, and therefore it has better performance than the other existing approaches. The Proposed Method significantly outperforms all others, consuming only 2.32% of its initial energy.