Cost-Driven Offloading for DNN-based Applications over Cloud, Edge and End Devices

Currently, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved a great success in various applications. Traditional deployment for DNNs in the cloud may incur a prohibitively serious delay in transferring input data from the end devices to the cloud. To address this problem, the hybrid computing environments, consisting of the cloud, edge and end devices, are adopted to offload DNN layers by combining the larger layers (more amount of data) in the cloud and the smaller layers (less amount of data) at the edge and end devices. A key issue in hybrid computing environments is how to minimize the system cost while accomplishing the offloaded layers with their deadline constraints. In this paper, a self-adaptive discrete particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm using the genetic algorithm (GA) operators was proposed to reduce the system cost caused by data transmission and layer execution. This approach considers the characteristics of DNNs partitioning and layers offloading over the cloud, edge and end devices. The mutation operator and crossover operator of GA were adopted to avert the premature convergence of PSO, which distinctly reduces the system cost through enhanced population diversity of PSO. The proposed offloading strategy is compared with benchmark solutions, and the results show that our strategy can effectively reduce the cost of offloading for DNN-based applications over the cloud, edge and end devices relative to the benchmarks

Compacting Deep Neural Networks for Internet of Things: Methods and Applications

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown great success in completing complex tasks. However, DNNs inevitably bring high computational cost and storage consumption due to the complexity of hierarchical structures, thereby hindering their wide deployment in Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, which have limited computational capability and storage capacity. Therefore, it is a necessity to investigate the technologies to compact DNNs. Despite tremendous advances in compacting DNNs, few surveys summarize compacting-DNNs technologies, especially for IoT applications. Hence, this paper presents a comprehensive study on compacting-DNNs technologies. We categorize compacting-DNNs technologies into three major types: 1) network model compression, 2) Knowledge Distillation (KD), 3) modification of network structures. We also elaborate on the diversity of these approaches and make side-by-side comparisons. Moreover, we discuss the applications of compacted DNNs in various IoT applications and outline future directions.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figure