Adaptive Edge Offloading for Image Classification Under Rate Limit
This work addresses resource-constrained offloading for embedded devices in edge computing, but it is incremental as it applies existing DQN methods to a specific token bucket regulation scenario.
The paper tackles the problem of optimizing image classification accuracy on embedded devices under network bandwidth constraints by developing a lightweight, online offloading policy based on Deep Q-Network (DQN), demonstrating its efficacy and feasibility on a local testbed with synthetic ImageNet traces.
This paper considers a setting where embedded devices are used to acquire and classify images. Because of limited computing capacity, embedded devices rely on a parsimonious classification model with uneven accuracy. When local classification is deemed inaccurate, devices can decide to offload the image to an edge server with a more accurate but resource-intensive model. Resource constraints, e.g., network bandwidth, however, require regulating such transmissions to avoid congestion and high latency. The paper investigates this offloading problem when transmissions regulation is through a token bucket, a mechanism commonly used for such purposes. The goal is to devise a lightweight, online offloading policy that optimizes an application-specific metric (e.g., classification accuracy) under the constraints of the token bucket. The paper develops a policy based on a Deep Q-Network (DQN), and demonstrates both its efficacy and the feasibility of its deployment on embedded devices. Of note is the fact that the policy can handle complex input patterns, including correlation in image arrivals and classification accuracy. The evaluation is carried out by performing image classification over a local testbed using synthetic traces generated from the ImageNet image classification benchmark. Implementation of this work is available at https://github.com/qiujiaming315/edgeml-dqn.