aspg-20-821-1791307513 20261006172513 American Scientific Publishing Group admin@americaspg.com American Scientific Publishing Group International Journal of Wireless and Ad Hoc Communication IJWAC 2692-4056 2021 3 1 Mohamed Elhoseny Faculty of Computers and Information, Mansoura University, 35516, Egypt X. Yuan Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of North Texas, USA Mohamed Abdel-Basset Faculty of Computers and Informatics, Zagazig University, Zagazig, Sharqiyah, 44519, Egypt Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have gained maximum interest in diverse applications ranging from military to civilian areas. The presence of numerous energy-constrained UAVs in an adhoc manner poses several design issues. At the same time, the limited battery, high mobility, and adaptive characteristics of the UAVs need effective design of clustering techniques for UAVs. In this manner, this paper presents a levy flight with a krill herd optimization algorithm (LF-KHOA) for energy-efficient clustering in UAVs. The proposed LF-KHOA technique integrates the concepts of LF to the KHOA to enhance efficiency and search space exploration. In addition, the LF-KHOA technique derives a fitness function involving three input parameters to elect cluster heads (CHs) and organize clusters. The energy consumed by the UAVs depends on the distance from UAVs to nearby nodes. Therefore, the fitness function aims to decrease communication distance, which mitigates energy utilization when transmitting the information. To ensure the better performance of the LF-KHOA technique, an extensive set of simulations takes place, and the results are inspected in terms of different measures. The experimental results highlighted the betterment of the LF-KHOA technique over the current state of art techniques. 2021 17 25 821 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 10.54216/IJWAC.030102 https://americaspg.com/journal/20/article/821 https://americaspg.com/storage/6259.pdf