Split Convolutional Neural Networks for Distributed Inference on Concurrent IoT Sensors

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly adopted on resource-constrained sensors for in-situ data analytics in Internet of Things (IoT) applications. This paper presents a model split framework, namely, splitCNN, in order to run a large CNN on a collection of concurrent IoT sensors. Specifically, we adopt CNN filter pruning techniques to split the large CNN into multiple small-size models, each of which is only sensitive to a certain number of data classes. These class-specific models are deployed onto the resource-constrained concurrent sensors which collaboratively perform distributed CNN inference on their same/similar sensing data. The outputs of multiple models are then fused to yield the global inference result. We apply splitCNN to three case studies with different sensing modalities, which include the human voice, industrial vibration signal, and visual sensing data. Extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed splitCNN. In particular, the splitCNN achieves significant reduction in the model size and inference time while maintaining similar accuracy, compared with the original CNN model for all three case studies.