Optimizing Secure Data Transmission in Cognitive IoT‐WSN: An Energy‐Aware Approach With Hybrid POA‐SCA and Block Chain Technology

ABSTRACT In the field of cognitive networks, particularly within the Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks, secure and energy‐efficient data transmission is crucial. Traditional methods often fall short in optimizing energy and enhancing security during data transmission. Effective key management schemes that are both secure and energy‐efficient are still lacking. Moreover, many challenges remain based on high computational overhead, diversity, low throughout, and latency issues, which lead to poor performance. To find the solution for aforementioned issues, this research proposes a novel Multipath Link Routing Protocol for secure and energy‐aware data transmission, leveraging optimal cluster head selection within cognitive Internet of Things‐wireless sensor networks applications. The sensor data is collected from the environment using sensor nodes. The novel Hybrid Pelican Optimization Algorithm based Sine Cosine Algorithm is suggested to choose optimal clusters during cluster generation. In this, the Sine Cosine Algorithm is integrated into the Pelican Optimization Algorithm to mitigate diversity challenges and ensure proper balancing. Then, the Multipath Link Routing Protocol approach implements numerous paths for dependable and effective data transfer across sensor nodes. Here, pair wise keys are shared by Multipath Link Routing Protocol approach between adjacent nodes to guarantee secure transmission. Additionally, the implementation of homomorphic encryption technique encrypts and decrypts messages to address the key distribution issue for securing transmission during secret key generation. Furthermore, data degradation and retransmission are avoided by this protocol, which uses query, routing request, and route reply to identify the routing from source node to destination node. After that, the creation of a blockchain‐assisted authentication framework ensures safe access while guarding against illegal access in cloud‐stored data. By encrypting the input data, the hash function applies SHA 512 to generate hash value in blockchain technology. The objective is to create a routing protocol that maximizes the effectiveness of data sharing while taking into account the intrinsic limits of sensor nodes such as computing and energy limitations. By using performance metrics like throughput, latency, and energy efficiency, the system achieves its goals. Compared to prior secure data transmission approaches, the proposed approach attains greater findings of 98.15% throughput, 110‐J energy consumption, 87‐ms latency, and 98.59% security rate, where the values are greater than other techniques. The simulation findings indicate that the proposed approach successfully improves security and energy efficiency for data transmission in cognitive Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks.