Cost-Efficient Deep Neural Network Placement in Edge Intelligence-Enabled Internet of Things

Abstract

Edge intelligence (EI) integrates edge computing and artificial intelligence empowering service providers to deploy deep neural networks (DNNs) on edge servers in proximity to users to provision intelligent applications (e.g., autonomous driving) for ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) in smart cities, which facilitates the quality of experience (QoE) of users and improves the processing and energy efficiency. However, considering DNN is typically computational-intensive and resource-hungry, conventional placement approaches ignore the influence of multi-dimensional resource requirements (processor, memory, etc.), which may degrade the real-time performance. Moreover, with the increasing scale of geo-distributed edge servers, centralized decision-making is still challenging to find the optimal strategies effectively. To overcome these shortcomings, in this paper we propose a game theoretic DNN placement approach in EI-enabled IoT. First, a DNN placement optimization problem is formulated to maximize system benefits, which is proven to be \(\mathcal {N}\mathcal {P} \) -hard and model the original problem as an exact potential game (EPG). Moreover, an EP G-based DNN m o del p l acement algorithm, named EPOL, is designed for edge servers to make sub-optimal strategies independently and theoretical analysis is possessed to guarantee the performance of EPOL. Finally, real-world dataset based experimental results corroborate the superiority and effectiveness of EPOL.