This paper is a follow-up to a recent work by the authors on recoverable UAV-based energy-efficient reconfigurable routing (RUBER) scheme for addressing sensor node and route failure issues in smart wireless livestock sensor networks. Time complexity and processing cost issues connected to the RUBER scheme are consequently treated in this article by proffering a time-aware UAV-based energy-efficient reconfigurable routing (TUBER) scheme. TUBER scheme employs a synchronized clustering-with-backup strategy, a minimum-hop neighborhood recovery mechanism, and a redundancy minimization technique. Comparative network performance of TUBER was investigated and evaluated with respect to RUBER and UAV-based energy-efficient reconfigurable routing (UBER) schemes. The metrics adopted for this comparative performance analysis are Cluster Survival Ratio (CSR), Network Stability (NST), Energy Dissipation Ratio (EDR), Network Coverage (COV), Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Fault Tolerance Index (FTI), Load Balancing Ratio (LBR), Routing Overhead (ROH), Average Routing Delay (ARD), Failure Detection Ratio (FDR), and Failure Recovery Ratio (FRR). With reference to best-obtained values, TUBER demonstrated improvements of 36.25%, 24.81%, 34.53%, 15.65%, 38.32%, 61.07%, 31.66%, 63.20%, 68.96%, 66.19%, and 78.63% over RUBER and UBER in terms of CSR, NST, EDR, COV, PDR, FTI, LBR, ROH, ARD, FDR, and FRR, respectively. These experimental results confirmed the relative effectiveness of TUBER against the compared routing schemes.