Channel-Adaptive Edge AI: Maximizing Inference Throughput by Adapting Computational Complexity to Channel States

Integrated communication and computation (IC2) has emerged as a new paradigm for enabling efficient edge inference in sixth-generation (6G) networks. However, the design of IC2 technologies is hindered by the lack of a tractable theoretical framework for characterizing end-to-end (E2E) inference performance. The metric is highly complicated as it needs to account for both channel distortion and artificial intelligence (AI) model architecture and computational complexity. In this work, we address this challenge by developing a tractable analytical model for E2E inference accuracy and leveraging it to design a channel-adaptive AI algorithm that maximizes inference throughput, referred to as the edge processing rate (EPR), under latency and accuracy constraints. Specifically, we consider an edge inference system in which a server deploys a backbone model with early exit, which enables flexible computational complexity, to perform inference on data features transmitted by a mobile device. The proposed accuracy model characterizes high-dimensional feature distributions in the angular domain using a Mixture of von Mises (MvM) distribution. This leads to a desired closed-form expression for inference accuracy as a function of quantization bit-width and model traversal depth, which represents channel distortion and computational complexity, respectively. Building upon this accuracy model, we formulate and solve the EPR maximization problem under joint latency and accuracy constraints, leading to a channel-adaptive AI algorithm that achieves full IC2 integration. The proposed algorithm jointly adapts transmit-side feature compression and receive-side model complexity according to channel conditions to maximize overall efficiency and inference throughput. Experimental results demonstrate its superior performance as compared with fixed-complexity counterparts.