Adaptive reverse task offloading in edge computing for AI processes

Nowadays, we witness the proliferation of edge IoT devices, ranging from smart cameras to autonomous vehicles, with increasing computing capabilities, used to implement AI-based services in users’ proximity, right at the edge. As these services are often computationally demanding, the popular paradigm of offloading their tasks to nearby cloud servers has gained much traction and been studied extensively. In this work, we propose a new paradigm that departs from the above typical edge computing offloading idea. Namely, we argue that it is possible to leverage these end nodes to assist larger nodes (e.g., cloudlets) in executing AI tasks. Indeed, as more and more end nodes are deployed, they create an abundance of idle computing capacity, which, when aggregated and exploited in a systematic fashion, can be proved beneficial. We introduce the idea of reverse offloading and study a scenario where a powerful node splits an AI task into a group of subtasks and assigns them to a set of nearby edge IoT nodes. The goal of each node is to minimize the overall execution time, which is constrained by the slowest subtask, while adhering to predetermined energy consumption and AI performance constraints. This is a challenging MINLP (Mixed Integer Non-Linear Problem) optimization problem that we tackle with a novel approach through our newly introduced EAI-ARO (Edge AI-Adaptive Reverse Offloading) algorithm. Furthermore, a demonstration of the efficacy of our reverse offloading proposal using an edge computing testbed and a representative AI service is performed. The findings suggest that our method optimizes the system’s performance significantly when compared with a greedy and a baseline task offloading algorithm.