FUSION: Forecast-Embedded Agent Scheduling with Service Incentive Optimization over Distributed Air-Ground Edge Networks

TL;DR

FUSION is a forecasting-driven, incentive-based framework for optimizing service provisioning in distributed air-ground networks, addressing uncertainties, heterogeneity, and coexistence of human and machine users.

Contribution

The paper introduces FUSION, a novel two-stage optimization framework combining demand forecasting, incentive mechanisms, and game-theoretic scheduling for air-ground edge networks.

Findings

Achieves higher social welfare and resource utilization.

Maintains latency and energy costs comparable to baselines.

Ensures individual rationality and near-truthfulness.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a first-of-its-kind forecasting-driven, incentive-inherent service provisioning framework for distributed air-ground integrated networks that explicitly accounts for human-machine coexistence. In our framework, vehicular-UAV agent pairs (APs) are proactively dispatched to overloaded hotspots to augment the computing capacity of edge servers (ESs), which in turn gives rise to a set of challenges that we jointly address: highly uncertain spatio-temporal workloads, spatio-temporal coupling between road traffic and UAV capacity, forecast-driven contracting risks, and heterogeneous quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of human users (HUs) and machine users (MUs). To address these challenges, we propose FUSION, a two-stage optimization framework, consisting of an offline stage and an online stage. In the offline stage, a liquid neural network-powered module performs multi-step spatio-temporal demand forecasting at distributed ESs, whose outputs are exploited by an enhanced ant colony optimization-based routing scheme and an auction-based incentive-compatible contracting mechanism, to jointly determine ES-AP contracts and pre-planned service routes. In the online stage, we formulate the congestion-aware task scheduling as a potential game among HUs, MUs, and heterogeneous ES/UAVs, and devise a potential-guided best-response dynamics algorithm that provably converges to a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that FUSION consistently achieves higher social welfare and improved resource utilization, while maintaining latency and energy costs comparable to state-of-the-art baselines and preserving individual rationality, budget balance, and near-truthfulness.