Applications of Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have advanced rapidly in recent years. The UAVs are used for a variety of applications, including surveillance, disaster management, precision agriculture, weather forecasting, etc. In near future, the growing number of UAV applications would necessitate densification of UAV infrastructure (ground radio station (GRS) and ground control station (GCS)) at the expense of increased energy consumption for UAV communications. Maximizing the energy efficiency of this UAV infrastructure is important. Motivated by this, we propose joint resource allocation and UAV scheduling with GRS sleeping (GRSS). Further, we propose the use of coordinated multi-point (CoMP) with joint transmission (JT) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) along with GRSS to increase the coverage and data rates, respectively. Through exhaustive simulation results, we show that the proposed CoMP along with GRSS results in up to 10% higher energy savings and 24% increase in coverage. Further, NOMA along with GRSS results in up to 9% enhancement in throughput of the system. © 2013 IEEE.