  Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have drastically gained popularity in various
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications to improve the safety and
efficiency of transportation systems. In this context, the combination of
ground vehicles, such as delivery trucks, with drones to assist in the last
mile pick-up and delivery of the parcels has been recently proposed. While
aerial vehicles promise increased efficiency based on flexible routes and
parallelized operation, highly reliable wireless communication is also required
for the control and coordination of potentially many drones acting in a
self-organized way. In this paper, we analyze the improvements procured by
drone usage in parcel delivery compared to traditional delivery and propose a
simulation framework to further quantify the efficiency gains of the parcel
delivery logistics and to analyze the performance of different wireless
communications options. To this end, we consider a heterogeneous vehicle
routing problem with various constraints. We consider two approaches regarding
the dispatching and recovery of drones and evaluate their benefits as opposed
to parcel delivery with a classic truck only. Furthermore, we compare two
networking technologies for enabling coordination of the self-organizing teams
of drones with a realistically modeled environment: one approach relying on
base station oriented Long Term Evolution (LTE) vs. a more decentralized
Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) solution. The results show time savings
of nearly 40% can be achieved through drone usage and that the negative impact
of urban shadowing on network communications in the base station oriented LTE
approach can be compensated by leveraging decentralized C-V2X communications
