Purpose Data traffic through wireless communication is significantly increasing, resulting in the frequency of streaming applications as various formats and the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT), such as virtual reality, edge device based transportation and surveillance systems. Growth in kind of applications resulted in increasing the scope of wireless communication and allocating a spectrum, as well as methods to decrease the intervention between nearby-located wireless links functioning on the same spectrum bands and hence to proliferation for the spectral efficiency. Recent advancement in drone technology has evolved quickly leading on board sensors with increased energy, storage, communication and processing capabilities. In future, the drone sensor networks will be more common and energy utilization will play a crucial role to maintain a fully functional network for the longest period of time. Envisioning the aerial drone network, this study proposes a robust high level design of algorithms for the drones (group coordination). The proposed design is validated with two algorithms using multiple drones consisting of various on-board sensors. In addition, this paper also discusses the challenges involved in designing solutions. The result obtained through proposed method outperforms the traditional techniques with the transfer rate of more than 3 MB for data transfer in the drone with coordination Design/methodology/approach Fair Scheduling Algorithm (FSA) using a queue is a distributed slot assignment algorithm. The FSA executes in rounds. The duration of each round is dynamic based upon the delay in the network. FSA prevents the collision by ensuring that none of the neighboring node gets the same slot. Nodes (Arivudainambi et al., 2019) which are separated by two or more hopes can get assigned in the same slot, thereby preventing the collision. To achieve fairness at the scheduling level, the FSA maintains four different states for each node as IDLE, REQUEST, GRANT and RELEASE. Findings A multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) system can operate in both centralized and decentralized manner. In a centralized system, the ground control system will take care of drone data collection, decisions on navigation, task updation, etc. In a decentralized system, the UAVs are unambiguously collaborating on various levels as mentioned in the centralized system to achieve the goal which is represented in Figure 2. Research limitations/implications However, the multi-UAVs are context aware in situations such as environmental observation, UAV–UAV communication and decision-making. Independent of whether operation is centralized or decentralized, this study relates the goals of the multi-UAVs are sensing, communication and coordination among other UAVs, etc. Figure 3 shows overall system architecture. Practical implications The individual events attempts in the UAV’s execution are required to complete the mission in superlative manner which affects in every multi UAV system. This multi UAV systems need to take a steady resolute on what way UAV has to travel and what they need to complete to face the critical situations in changing of environments with the uncertain information. This coordination algorithm has certain dimensions including events that they needs to resolute on, the information that they used to make a resolution, the resolute making algorithm, the degree of decentralization. In multi UAV systems, the coordinated events ranges from lower motion level. Originality/value This study has proposed a novel self-organizing coordination algorithm for multi-UAV systems. Further, the experimental results also confirm that is robust to form network at ease. The testbed for this simulation to sensing, communication, evaluation and networking. The algorithm coordination has to testbed with multi UAVs systems. The two scheduling techniques has been used to transfer the packets using done network. The self-organizing algorithm (SOA) with fair scheduling queue outperforms the weighted queue scheduling in the transfer rate with less loss and time lag. The results obtained through from Figure 10 clearly indicates that the fair queue scheduling with SOA have several advantages over weighted fair queue in different parameters.