Recent advances in artificial intelligence have driven increasing intelligent applications at the network edge, such as smart home, smart factory, and smart city. To deploy computationally intensive Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on resource-constrained edge devices, traditional approaches have relied on either offloading workload to the remote cloud or optimizing computation at the end device locally. However, the cloud-assisted approaches suffer from the unreliable and delay-significant wide-area network, and the local computing approaches are limited by the constrained computing capability. Towards high-performance edge intelligence, the cooperative execution mechanism offers a new paradigm, which has attracted growing research interest recently. In this paper, we propose CoEdge, a distributed DNN computing system that orchestrates cooperative DNN inference over heterogeneous edge devices. CoEdge utilizes available computation and communication resources at the edge and dynamically partitions the DNN inference workload adaptive to devices' computing capabilities and network conditions. Experimental evaluations based on a realistic prototype show that CoEdge outperforms status-quo approaches in saving energy with close inference latency, achieving up to 25.5%~66.9% energy reduction for four widely-adopted CNN models.

本研究提出一种名为CoEdge的分布式深度神经网络计算系统，优化了边缘设备的计算和通信资源，在许多共同参与的异构边缘设备上进行协同深度神经网络计算，与现有方法相比，CoEdge在降低能耗方面更具优势。

CoEdge: 基於異構邊緣設備的自適應工作負載分配合作式DNN推論