Edge AI as a Service with Coordinated Deep Neural Networks

As artificial intelligence (AI) applications continue to expand in next-generation networks, there is a growing need for deep neural network (DNN) models. Although DNN models deployed at the edge are promising for providing AI as a service with low latency, their cooperation is yet to be explored. In this paper, we consider that DNN service providers share their computing resources as well as their models' parameters and allow other DNNs to offload their computations without mirroring. We propose a novel algorithm called coordinated DNNs on edge (CoDE) that facilitates coordination among DNN services by establishing new inference paths. CoDE aims to find the optimal path, which is the path with the highest possible reward, by creating multi-task DNNs from individual models. The reward reflects the inference throughput and model accuracy. With CoDE, DNN models can make new paths for inference by using their own or other models' parameters. We then evaluate the performance of CoDE through numerical experiments. The results demonstrate a 40% increase in the inference throughput while degrading the average accuracy by only 2.3%. Experiments show that CoDE enhances the inference throughput and, achieves higher precision compared to a state-of-the-art existing method.