Traffic-Aware DNN Inference Task Offloading in the Mobile Device-Edge Continuum

The rapid growth of mobile devices and machine learning (ML)-based applications is driving a surge in data traffic. Even when inference tasks are considered, a huge amount of data needs to be transferred into the network, e.g., large Deep Neural Network (DNN) models retrieved for on-device inference or streams of input data sent from the device to the edge if the task is offloaded. To address the resulting potential network congestion, we formulate a novel optimization problem aimed at deciding where to execute streams of DNN inference tasks from multiple devices across the mobile device-edge continuum in order to minimize the amount of exchanged data traffic, while satisfying accuracy, latency, and battery constraints. The formulated problem also selects the model variant (in terms of size and accuracy) that best suits the placement decision (device, edge). Results, collected under a wide variety of different settings, showcase the validity of our proposal and its supremacy over the considered benchmark schemes, with gains in terms of saved bandwidth up to 98%.