SmartClus: Mobility and Energy-Aware Autonomous Aerial Vehicles’ Clustering for B5G Cellular Networks

Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) are key enablers for various beyond-5G (B5G) applications, including remote sensing, monitoring, emergency response, and delivery systems. However, communication with AAVs faces challenges such as energy constraints, dynamic environments, weather sensitivity, and high mobility. Ensuring connectivity for fast-moving AAVs while minimizing energy consumption to extend network lifetime remains critical. This paper presents SmartClus, a lightweight and dynamic clustering framework designed to address AAV group mobility and resource sharing. To enable efficient cluster formations, a multi-metric cluster head (CH) fitness and mobility similarity score process is formulated, that considers communication quality, spatial proximity, velocity, and direction. The extensive performance evaluation in the NS3 network simulator shows that SmartClus outperforms two state-of-the-art schemes. The results demonstrated that the proposed approach nearly doubled the average throughput, and reduced transmission delays by 2 to 4 seconds. Moreover, SmartClus achieved a packet delivery ratio (PDR) of 70% to 90% compared to previous schemes with 50% to 70% and 60% to 80%, and extended average CH lifetime (being CH longer and requiring no re-clustering).