An Efficient Communication Method Based on Data Mules in Low-Density Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Networks

The rapid advances of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology have fundamentally transformed wide-area monitoring and data transmission for military communications, particularly in battlefield scenarios infrastructure-free. However, as the monitoring area expands, designing and managing UAV networks becomes increasingly complex, which poses a major challenge for efficient long-distance data transmission. The key issue is how to establish reliable, long-distance communication links with a limited number of UAVs, especially under low node density conditions (< 2 nodes/), while ensuring efficient end-to-end data transmission. In this study, we propose a cooperative data transport scheme that uses UAVs as “data mules”. We also model the positional errors incurred during UAV mobility and self-localization to ensure reliable data delivery. Building on achieving end-to-end communication, we further optimize the scheme to improve link energy efficiency by adjusting UAV quantity, maneuver duration, and communication range. Simulation results show that compared to traditional methods [store-and-forward, multi-hop routing], our scheme reduces transmission delay by 15.2% and 9.3%, respectively, while increasing energy consumption by 5.6% and 13.9%. Furthermore, compared to multi-hop UAV schemes optimized by different algorithms, our approach exhibits superior overall transmission efficiency, particularly in high-interference environments and video transmission scenarios with large data volumes.