# An Efficient Framework for Secure Communication in Internet of Drone Networks Using Deep Computing
## 3 Materials and Methods
### System Model and Problem Formulation
#### 3.1.6 Protocol Phases
The computational cost was calculated as the CPU time taken to perform the entire authentication process, and the results proved that SecureDrone outperforms all other protocols in terms of computational cost. As evident from Figure 3, SecureDrone has around 30% less computational cost than LDAP, 33% less than TAUROT, 42% less than IoD-Auth, and 27% less than LEMAP when tested with 50 drones. All of these efficiencies owe their existence to the implementation of light ECC operations rather than heavy computations of RSA, an improved AES-GCM to encrypt sessions using optimized versioning, streamlined behavior pattern match algorithms, and the offloading of computationally exhaustive tasks like training ML models on cloud servers but maintaining the inference operations lightweight to deploy in edge. The computation overhead breakup is depicted in Table 3. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline
**Parameter** & **Value** \\ \hline Simulator & NS2 (version 2.35) \\ Simulation duration & 1000 s \\ Simulation area & 1000 m \(\times\) 1000 m \\ Number of drones & 5–50 \\ Number of users & 1–20 \\ Number of ground stations & 2–8 \\ Number of edge servers & 1–5 \\ Drone mobility model & Random Waypoint \\ Drone speed & 0–20 m/s \\ Communication range & 100 m(drone-to-GCS) \\ Bandwidth & 5 Mbps (D2G), 20 Mbps (G2E), 50 Mbps (E2C) \\ MAC protocol & IEEE 802.11n \\ Propagation model & Two-ray ground \\ Packet size & 512 bytes \\ Cryptographic algorithm & ECC-256 (asymmetric), AES-128-GCM (symmetric) \\ Machine learning model & Ensemble (LSTM + Random Forest) \\ Authentication frequency & Every 300 s \\ Background traffic & CBR (varying intensity) \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Simulation Parameters. Figure 5: Computational overhead (in ms) of five key protocols as number of drones increases. ### Authentication Latency

Authentication latency is the amount of time taken from the request for authentication to its successful completion, as shown in Figure 6 for a comparison of authentication latency among protocols under different network loads. This graph illustrates end-to-end authentication latencies between protocols with growing network loads. SecureDrone's better performance during heavy network loads (100 requests/s) reflects its effectiveness under crowded network environments characteristic of dense city drone operations.The findings indicate that SecureDrone consistently records less authentication latency than other protocols in all the network conditions with about 35% less latency than LDAP, 32% less than TAUROT, 39% less than IoD-Auth, and 24% less than LEMAP at the maximum network loading (100 requests/s). This is made possible through an optimized security workflow with less message exchange, optimized cryptographic processing, parallel execution of independent security processes, behavior analysis in the edge, and adaptive challenge complexity based on security needs. ### Memory Usage Analysis

Memory consumption is an important consideration for resource-limited drone devices, and we have observed the memory consumption during authentication with varying numbers of concurrent sessions in Figure 7. From the results, it can be seen that Secure \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Operation** & **SecureDrone** & **LDAP** & **TAUROT** & **IoD-Auth** & **LEMAP** \\ \hline Digital Signature & 4.2 & 7.8 & 6.5 & 8.9 & 5.3 \\ Generation & & & & & \\ Signature & 5.1 & 6.9 & 6.2 & 8.4 & 5.8 \\ Verification & 3.8 & 5.7 & 5.3 & 7.2 & 4.5 \\ Symmetric & 0.7 & 0.8 & 0.9 & 0.8 & 0.8 \\ Encryption & & & & & \\ Symmetric & 0.8 & 0.9 & 1.0 & 0.9 & 0.9 \\ Description & & & & & \\ Hashing & 0.6 & 0.7 & 0.7 & 0.8 & 0.7 \\ Behavior Analysis & 5.2 & N/A & 5.8 & N/A & 4.7 \\ Total & 20.4 & 22.8 & 26.4 & 27.0 & 22.7 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 3: Computational overhead breakdown (ms). Figure 6: Authentication times comparison across five key protocols as network traffic increases.