Digital Tides: A Fluid-Dynamic Framework for Flux-Aware Infrastructure Provisioning in UAV Logistics Networks

Abstract

The emergence of high-frequency pulsating logistics unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms gives rise to ``Digital Tides'', i.e., complex traffic dynamics that challenge sustainable resource provisioning in mobile computing networks. Conventional infrastructure provisioning strategies, which typically rely on static snapshot-based analysis and localized density estimation, fail to capture the macroscopic advection of computational workloads. As a result, reactive resource activation suffers from inherent hysteresis, yielding nominal efficiency gains at the cost of mission-critical service loss at the advancing wavefront. To address this issue, we develop a fluid-based spatiotemporal framework by explicitly solving the continuity equation to characterize the macroscopic velocity field of the workload flow. Building on this framework, we propose a flux-aware asymmetric activation strategy that leverages the derived information flux vector as a kinematic precursor of demand propagation. Unlike symmetric thresholding, the proposed control logic decouples activation and deactivation dynamics. Theoretical analysis confirms the intrinsic spatial phase-lead of the flux signal and shows that the proposed strategy generates a proactive guard ring to compensate for service setup latency, including delays caused by mobile edge computing container cold-starts. We further derive closed-form expressions for instantaneous service availability and period-average energy efficiency. In addition, we formulate a quality-of-service-penalized metric to evaluate effective energy efficiency under strict outage constraints. Numerical results show that the proposed flux-driven strategy enables zero-latency tracking of the mobile wavefront and achieves a Pareto-optimal trade-off between service reliability and energy consumption, outperforming reactive baselines in dynamic logistics corridors.

17 pages, 11 figures. Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing