Agentic AI Enabling Autonomous, Self-Organizing, and Evolving UAV Networks

Abstract

As low-altitude applications expand across emergency response, intelligent transportation, and autonomous operations, they demand communication networks that can deliver flexible, resilient, and rapidly deployable connectivity. Heterogeneous UAV networks are a promising solution, as they can dynamically provide sensing, access, relay, and backhaul functions. Yet, most existing approaches assume predefined missions, prior knowledge of user distributions, and manually configured infrastructure, making them ill suited to dynamic and initially unknown environments. Addressing this limitation requires a shift from mission-oriented UAV deployment to autonomous network formation, in which UAVs continuously perceive their surroundings, infer evolving service demands, and self-organize network resources. Agentic AI, empowered by large language models (LLMs), offers a new foundation for this shift by integrating closed-loop perception, reasoning, planning, and execution across heterogeneous information sources. Unlike conventional optimization and learning methods designed for individual networking tasks, agentic AI can coordinate these capabilities to support sustained, network-level autonomy. In this article, we explore agentic AI for autonomous and self-organizing heterogeneous UAV networks in low-altitude environments. Our key contribution is an LLM-assisted architecture in which a base-station-hosted agent conducts global network reasoning and autonomously reconfigures access and backhaul infrastructure. The proposed system explores unknown environments, discovers users, and deploys UAVs on demand to provide access and establish end-to-end backhaul connectivity. A case study illustrates how this agentic-AI-driven approach can transform UAVs from task-specific platforms into a continuously evolving communication network.