## 1 Introduction
In a certificateless cryptosystem, a participant private key is composed of two parts: the partial private key and a secret value. The trusted third-party key generation center (KGC) generates the partial private key, whereas the secret value is affirmed by the participant. Similarly, a participant's public key also consists of two parts, these being the participant's identity information and the public key conforming to the secret value. Therefore, the cost of public key management is significantly reduced due to the fact that the public key does not require any certificate. Furthermore, it does not suffer from the key escrow problem because the KGC has no information about the participant secret value. Typically, small UAVs have batteries that last for merely 20 to 30 min [6]. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to manage the battery resources efficiently. This prolongs the network lifetime especially for large-scale deployments of UAVs. Thus, it is harder for the UAVs to complete these resource-hungry applications in a timely fashion. Furthermore, FANET can be deployed in remote locations to assist the Internet of Things (IoT) devices for collecting large volumes of data. Fortunately, these impediments can be mitigated by employing multi-access edge computing (MEC) technology. The MEC shifts the job performed by the commanding UAV to the edge of the network, which is closer to UAV, thus reducing the propagation delay. The MEC thus paves way for a diverse set of applications that, explicitly, demand a real-time response. The heterogeneous radio access network of a ground-based network is composed of macro cells and small cells. The network assists the mobile phones, driver-less cars, and IoT gadgets, among others, in performing the required operations. Therefore, as a direct consequence, a multitude of emerging technologies can synergize with the 5G (fifth generation) wireless networks. A symbiotic relation can be visualized between the UAVs, engaged in scheduling the computing tasks, and the onboard microprocessor, dedicated to executing the particular operations. Furthermore, the usable data can be stored temporarily for retrieval by either the UAVs or the ground devices, while, concurrently, the drone-cells transmit the data. Normally, the security and efficiency of the aforementioned signature scheme is based on some computationally hard problems, for example, Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA), bilinear pairing, and elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). RSA offers a solution based on large factorization [7; 8], which utilizes a 1024 bit large key [9]. However, due to the restricted on-board processing capabilities on UAVs, the solution is not appropriate for the resource-constrained FANET system. In addition, bilinear pairing, which suffers from high pairing and map-to-point function computations, is 14.90 times worse than RSA [10]. Therefore, in order to counter the shortcomings of RSA and bilinear pairing, a new category of cryptography, elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) was introduced [11]. ECC is characterized by a smaller parameter size and involves miniaturized versions of public key, private key, identity, and certificate size, among other factors. Moreover, unlike bilinear pairing and RSA, the security hardness and efficiency of the scheme is based on 160 bit small key, which is still not suitable for resource-hungry devices [12]. Thus, a new type called hyperelliptic-curve cryptography (HECC) was proposed [13]. The hyperelliptic curve uses an 80 bit key, identity, and certificate and offers security to the degree comparable to that of elliptic curve, bilinear pairing, and RSA [14; 15]. It is, hence, a far better choice for energy-constrained devices.