Designing and Training of Lightweight Neural Networks on Edge Devices using Early Halting in Knowledge Distillation

Automated feature extraction capability and significant performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNN) make them suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. However, deploying DNN on edge devices becomes prohibitive due to the colossal computation, energy, and storage requirements. This paper presents a novel approach for designing and training lightweight DNN using large-size DNN. The approach considers the available storage, processing speed, and maximum allowable processing time to execute the task on edge devices. We present a knowledge distillation based training procedure to train the lightweight DNN to achieve adequate accuracy. During the training of lightweight DNN, we introduce a novel early halting technique, which preserves network resources; thus, speedups the training procedure. Finally, we present the empirically and real-world evaluations to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach under different constraints using various edge devices.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, 11 table

FedAR+: A Federated Learning Approach To Appliance Recognition With Mislabeled Data In Residential Environments

With the enhancement of people\u27s living standards and the rapid evolution of cyber-physical systems, residential environments are becoming smart and well-connected, causing a significant raise in overall energy consumption. As household appliances are major energy consumers, their accurate recognition becomes crucial to avoid unattended usage and minimize peak-time load on the smart grids, thereby conserving energy and making smart environments more sustainable. Traditionally, an appliance recognition model is trained at a central server (service provider) by collecting electricity consumption data via smart plugs from the clients (consumers), causing a privacy breach. Besides that, the data are susceptible to noisy labels that may appear when an appliance gets connected to a non-designated smart plug. While addressing these issues jointly, we propose a novel federated learning approach to appliance recognition, called FedAR+, enabling decentralized model training across clients in a privacy-preserving way even with mislabeled training data. FedAR+ introduces an adaptive noise handling method, essentially a joint loss function incorporating weights and label distribution, to empower the appliance recognition model against noisy labels. By deploying smart plugs in an apartment complex, we collect a labeled dataset that, along with two existing datasets, are utilized to evaluate the performance of FedAR+. Experimental results show that our approach can effectively handle up to 30% concentration of noisy labels while outperforming the prior solutions by a large margin on accuracy

Improving Age of Information with Interference Problem in Long-Range Wide Area Networks

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) offer a promising wireless communications technology for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Among various existing LPWAN technologies, Long-Range WAN (LoRaWAN) consumes minimal power and provides virtual channels for communication through spreading factors. However, LoRaWAN suffers from the interference problem among nodes connected to a gateway that uses the same spreading factor. Such interference increases data communication time, thus reducing data freshness and suitability of LoRaWAN for delay-sensitive applications. To minimize the interference problem, an optimal allocation of the spreading factor is requisite for determining the time duration of data transmission. This paper proposes a game-theoretic approach to estimate the time duration of using a spreading factor that ensures on-time data delivery with maximum network utilization. We incorporate the Age of Information (AoI) metric to capture the freshness of information as demanded by the applications. Our proposed approach is validated through simulation experiments, and its applicability is demonstrated for a crop protection system that ensures real-time monitoring and intrusion control of animals in an agricultural field. The simulation and prototype results demonstrate the impact of the number of nodes, AoI metric, and game-theoretic parameters on the performance of the IoT network

An Energy Efficient Smart Metering System using Edge Computing in LoRa Network

An important research issue in smart metering is to correctly transfer the smart meter readings from consumers to the operator within the given time period by consuming minimum energy. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient smart metering system using Edge computing in Long Range (LoRa). We assume that all appliances in a house are connected to a smart meter that is affixed with Edge device and LoRa node for processing and transferring the processed smart meter readings, respectively. The energy consumption of the appliances can be represented as an energy multivariate time series. The system first proposes a deep learning-based compression-decompression model for reducing the size of the energy time series at the Edge devices. Next, it formulates an optimization problem for finding the suitable compressed energy time series to reduce the energy consumption and delay of the system. Finally, the system presents an algorithm for selecting the suitable spreading factors to transfer the compressed time series to the operator in the given time. Our simulation and prototype results demonstrate the impact of the parameters of the compression model, network, and the number of smart meters and appliances on delay, energy consumption, and accuracy of the system

Towards Identifying Alien Appliances using Semantic Information

Currently, the applicability of recognition approaches is limited to only native (known) appliances for which training data is available. It means the appliance with no training instances appears as an alien to the approaches. An alien (new) appliance may introduce as household any time by the electricity consumer. The central focus on this paper is on building an appliance recognition approach that can accurately identify both native and alien appliances by leveraging semantic information. This work also collects electricity usage data by deploying smart meters in an apartment complex, for experimental evaluation. The initial accuracy results are satisfactory and validating the effectiveness of our approach for alien appliances