A Survey on Collaborative DNN Inference for Edge Intelligence
It provides a systematic review for researchers in edge AI, but it is incremental as it summarizes existing work without novel contributions.
This paper surveys collaborative DNN inference for edge intelligence, addressing the bottleneck of computation and data at the network edge by reviewing and classifying four paradigms, but it does not present new experimental results or concrete numbers.
With the vigorous development of artificial intelligence (AI), the intelligent applications based on deep neural network (DNN) change people's lifestyles and the production efficiency. However, the huge amount of computation and data generated from the network edge becomes the major bottleneck, and traditional cloud-based computing mode has been unable to meet the requirements of real-time processing tasks. To solve the above problems, by embedding AI model training and inference capabilities into the network edge, edge intelligence (EI) becomes a cutting-edge direction in the field of AI. Furthermore, collaborative DNN inference among the cloud, edge, and end device provides a promising way to boost the EI. Nevertheless, at present, EI oriented collaborative DNN inference is still in its early stage, lacking a systematic classification and discussion of existing research efforts. Thus motivated, we have made a comprehensive investigation on the recent studies about EI oriented collaborative DNN inference. In this paper, we firstly review the background and motivation of EI. Then, we classify four typical collaborative DNN inference paradigms for EI, and analyze the characteristics and key technologies of them. Finally, we summarize the current challenges of collaborative DNN inference, discuss the future development trend and provide the future research direction.