Computing at the edge is increasingly important since a massive amount of data is generated. This poses challenges in transporting all that data to the remote data centers and cloud, where they can be processed and analyzed. On the other hand, harnessing the edge data is essential for offering data-driven and machine learning-based applications, if the challenges, such as device capabilities, connectivity, and heterogeneity can be mitigated. Machine learning applications are very compute-intensive and require processing of large amount of data. However, edge devices are often resources-constrained, in terms of compute resources, power, storage, and network connectivity. Hence, limiting their potential to run efficiently and accurately state-of-the art deep neural network (DNN) models, which are becoming larger and more complex. This paper proposes a novel offloading mechanism by leveraging installed-base on-premises (edge) computational resources. The proposed mechanism allows the edge devices to offload heavy and compute-intensive workloads to edge nodes instead of using remote cloud. Our offloading mechanism has been prototyped and tested with state-of-the art person and object detection DNN models for mobile robots and video surveillance applications. The performance shows a significant gain compared to cloud-based offloading strategies in terms of accuracy and latency.
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd（华为技术有限公司）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Mobile edge computing facilitates users to offload computation tasks to edge servers for meeting their stringent delay requirements. Previous works mainly explore task offloading when system-side information is given (e.g., server processing speed, cellular data rate), or centralized offloading under system uncertainty. But both generally fall short to handle task placement involving many coexisting users in a dynamic and uncertain environment. In this paper, we develop a multi-user offloading framework considering unknown yet stochastic system-side information to enable a decentralized user-i…
University of Exeter（埃克塞特大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；British Telecom（英国电信）
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) aims to extend cloud service to the network edge to reduce network traffic and service latency. A fundamental problem in MEC is how to efficiently offload heterogeneous tasks of mobile applications from user equipment (UE) to MEC hosts. Recently, many deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based methods have been proposed to learn offloading policies through interacting with the MEC environment that consists of UE, wireless channels, and MEC hosts. However, these methods have weak adaptability to new environments because they have low sample efficiency and need ful…
A Fast Task Offloading Optimization Framework for IRS-Assisted Multi-Access Edge Computing System
BNU-HKBU United International College（北京师范大学-香港浸会大学联合国际学院）；Advanced Institute of Natural Sciences, Beijing Normal University（北京师范大学自然科学高等研究院）；Guangdong Key Lab of AI and Multi-Modal Data Processing（广东省人工智能与多模态数据处理重点实验室）
With the emergence of edge computing, the problem of offloading jobs between an Edge Device (ED) and an Edge Server (ES) received significant attention in the past. Motivated by the fact that an increasing number of applications are using Machine Learning (ML) inference, we study the problem of offloading inference jobs by considering the following novel aspects: 1) in contrast to a typical computational job, the processing time of an inference job depends on the size of the ML model, and 2) recently proposed Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) for resource-constrained devices provide the choice of sc…
Mobile devices can offload deep neural network (DNN)-based inference to the cloud, overcoming local hardware and energy limitations. However, offloading adds communication delay, thus increasing the overall inference time, and hence it should be used only when needed. An approach to address this problem consists of the use of adaptive model partitioning based on early-exit DNNs. Accordingly, the inference starts at the mobile device, and an intermediate layer estimates the accuracy: If the estimated accuracy is sufficient, the device takes the inference decision; Otherwise, the remaining layer…
This paper studies the computational offloading of CNN inference in dynamic multi-access edge computing (MEC) networks. To address the uncertainties in communication time and Edge servers' available capacity, we use early-exit mechanism to terminate the computation earlier to meet the deadline of inference tasks. We design a reward function to trade off the communication, computation and inference accuracy, and formulate the offloading problem of CNN inference as a maximization problem with the goal of maximizing the average inference accuracy and throughput in long term. To solve the maximiza…
DRL-Based Federated Self-Supervised Learning for Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in ISAC-Enabled Vehicle Edge Computing
School of Internet of Things Engineering, Jiangnan University（江南大学物联网工程学院）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University（清华大学信息科学与技术国家研究中心电子工程系）；State Key Lab. of ISN and School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学信息与通信系统国家重点实验室和电信工程学院）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学电子工程系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)（香港科技大学电子与计算机工程系）
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
This letter proposes an edge learning-based offloading framework for autonomous driving, where the deep learning tasks can be offloaded to the edge server to improve the inference accuracy while meeting the latency constraint. Since the delay and the inference accuracy are incurred by wireless communications and computing, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the inference accuracy subject to the offloading probability, the pre-braking probability, and data quality. Simulations demonstrate the superiority of the proposed offloading framework.
Southeast University（东南大学）；Purple Mountain Laboratories（紫金山实验室）；Guangzhou University（广州大学）；Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）
In this paper, we consider a multiuser mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where a mixed-integer offloading strategy is used to assist the resource assignment for task offloading. Although the conventional branch and bound (BnB) approach can be applied to solve this problem, a huge burden of computational complexity arises which limits the application of BnB. To address this issue, we propose an intelligent BnB (IBnB) approach which applies deep learning (DL) to learn the pruning strategy of the BnB approach. By using this learning scheme, the structure of the BnB approach ensures near-optimal…
Edge offloading for deep neural networks (DNNs) can be adaptive to the input's complexity by using early-exit DNNs. These DNNs have side branches throughout their architecture, allowing the inference to end earlier in the edge. The branches estimate the accuracy for a given input. If this estimated accuracy reaches a threshold, the inference ends on the edge. Otherwise, the edge offloads the inference to the cloud to process the remaining DNN layers. However, DNNs for image classification deals with distorted images, which negatively impact the branches' estimated accuracy. Consequently, the e…
University of Houston（休斯顿大学）；US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL)（美国空军研究实验室）
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) has already shown the potential in enabling mobile devices to bear the computation-intensive applications by offloading some tasks to a nearby access point (AP) integrated with a MEC server (MES). However, due to the varying network conditions and limited computation resources of the MES, the offloading decisions taken by a mobile device and the computational resources allocated by the MES may not be efficiently achieved with the lowest cost. In this paper, we propose a dynamic offloading framework for the MEC network, in which the uplink non-orthogonal multip…
VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland（芬兰VTT技术研究中心）；College of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Zhejiang University（浙江大学信息与电子工程学院）；Graduate School of Informatics and Engineering, University of Electro-Communications（电气通信大学信息与工程研究生院）；Auburn University（奥本大学）；National Institute of Informatics（国立信息学研究所）；Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu（奥卢大学无线通信中心）
To improve the quality of computation experience for mobile devices, mobile-edge computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm by providing computing capabilities in close proximity within a sliced radio access network (RAN), which supports both traditional communication and MEC services. Nevertheless, the design of computation offloading policies for a virtual MEC system remains challenging. Specifically, whether to execute a computation task at the mobile device or to offload it for MEC server execution should adapt to the time-varying network dynamics. In this paper, we consider MEC for a represe…
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Amazon Canada（亚马逊加拿大公司）
Mobile edge computing (MEC) emerges recently as a promising solution to relieve resource-limited mobile devices from computation-intensive tasks, which enables devices to offload workloads to nearby MEC servers and improve the quality of computation experience. Nevertheless, by considering a MEC system consisting of multiple mobile users with stochastic task arrivals and wireless channels in this paper, the design of computation offloading policies is challenging to minimize the long-term average computation cost in terms of power consumption and buffering delay. A deep reinforcement learning …
For in-vehicle application,task type and vehicle state information, i.e., vehicle speed, bear a significant impact on the task delay requirement. However, the joint impact of task type and vehicle speed on the task delay constraint has not been studied, and this lack of study may cause a mismatch between the requirement of the task delay and allocated computation and wireless resources. In this paper, we propose a joint task type and vehicle speed-aware task offloading and resource allocation strategy to decrease the vehicl's energy cost for executing tasks and increase the revenue of the vehi…
