FC-FTCP: a lightweight fault-tolerant clustering protocol for secure IoT data transmission

Internet of Things (IoT) plays a vital role in various applications, enabling device-level communication. However, challenges such as unauthorized access, latency, and data breaches require efficient and secure solutions. This paper proposes a Fog Computing-based Fault - Tolerance Clustering Protocol (FC-FTCP) integrated with lightweight cryptography and Off-the-Record (OTR) authentication to enhance data security and transmission reliability in IoT environments. The FC-FTCP protocol supports decentralized data processing and fault-tolerant routing to reduce delays and improve energy efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that FC-FTCP achieves an efficiency ratio of 98.45%, accurate data authentication at 95.12%, reduced network overhead (21.19%), lower latency (15.13%), computational overhead of 9.5 ms, and reduced computational cost (23.12%). Compared with existing protocols such as FEA-SDTS, HLSF, DIoTA, and CMANET-IoTIF, FC-FTCP shows consistent improvements in secure data handling and resource optimization, making it suitable for low-power IoT deployments.