Energy-Efficient Mapping for a Network of DNN Models at the Edge

This paper describes a novel framework for executing a network of trained deep neural network (DNN) models on commercial-off-the-shelf devices that are deployed in an IoT environment. The scenario consists of two devices connected by a wireless network: a user-end device (U), which is a low-end, energy and performance-limited processor, and a cloudlet (C), which is a substantially higher performance and energy-unconstrained processor. The goal is to distribute the computation of the DNN models between U and C to minimize the energy consumption of U while taking into account the variability in the wireless channel delay and the performance overhead of executing models in parallel. The proposed framework was implemented using an NVIDIA Jetson Nano for U and a Dell workstation with Titan Xp GPU as C. Experiments demonstrate significant improvements both in terms of energy consumption of U and processing delay.