Intelligent Maintenance and Routing Decision Making for UAV Clusters in Harsh Environments

UAV clusters operating in harsh environments must maintain connectivity under sudden node failures and dynamic traffic demands. Existing studies often address maintenance and routing separately, which leads to unnecessary reorganization overhead and forwarding bottlenecks around gateway nodes. To overcome these limitations, we propose a unified UAV Cluster Maintenance and Routing System (UCMR) that combines a firefly-inspired clustering method, a DQN–GCN-based medium-level interference recovery strategy (DGMR), and load-aware routing over forwarding neighbors. The maintenance component improves backbone repair by integrating global topology features with local observations, while the routing component exploits edge and node features to distribute forwarding pressure beyond gateway nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UCMR outperforms representative benchmark methods in terms of average end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio.