Improving Transmission in Integrated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle–Intelligent Connected Vehicle Networks with Selfish Nodes Using Opportunistic Approaches

The integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into vehicular networks offers numerous advantages in enhancing communication and coverage performance. With the ability to move flexibly in three-dimensional space, UAVs can effectively bridge the communication gap between intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs) and infrastructure. However, the rapid movement of UAVs and ICVs poses significant challenges to the stability and reliability of communication links. Motivated by these challenges, integrated UAV–ICV networks can be viewed as vehicular delay-tolerant networks (VDTNs), where data delivery is accomplished through the “store-carry-forward” transmission mechanism. Since VDTNs exhibit social attributes, this paper first investigates the opportunistic transmission problem in the presence of selfish nodes. Then, by enabling node cooperation, this paper proposes an opportunistic transmission scheme for integrated UAV–ICV networks. To address the issue of node selfishness in practical scenarios, the proposed scheme classifies the degree of cooperation and analyzes the encounter probability between nodes. Based on this, information is initially flooded, and the UAV is selected for data distribution by jointly considering the node centrality, energy consumption, and cache size. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the delivery ratio and reduce the average delivery delay compared to state-of-the-art schemes.