The sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication networks are anticipated in integrating aerial, terrestrial, and maritime communication into a robust system to accomplish trustworthy, quick, and low latency needs. It enables to achieve maximum throughput and delay for several applications. Besides, the evolution of 6G leads to the design of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in providing inexpensive and effective solutions in various application areas such as healthcare, environment monitoring, and so on. In the UAV network, effective data collection with restricted energy capacity poses a major issue to achieving high quality network communication. It can be addressed by the use of clustering techniques for UAVs in 6G networks. In this aspect, this study develops a novel metaheuristic based energy efficient data gathering scheme for clustered unmanned aerial vehicles (MEEDG-CUAV). The proposed MEEDG-CUAV technique intends in partitioning the UAV networks into various clusters and assign a cluster head (CH) to reduce the overall energy utilization. Besides, the quantum chaotic butterfly optimization algorithm (QCBOA) with a fitness function is derived to choose CHs and construct clusters. The experimental validation of the MEEDG-CUAV technique occurs utilizing benchmark dataset and the experimental results highlighted the better performance over the other state of art techniques interms of different measures.

6G network; mobile communication; uav networks; energy efficiency; clustering; metaheuristics