Model-Distributed Inference in Multi-Source Edge Networks

Distributed inference techniques can be broadly classified into data-distributed and model-distributed schemes. In data-distributed inference (DDI), each worker carries the entire deep neural network (DNN) model, but processes only a subset of the data. However, feeding the data to workers results in high communication costs especially when the data is large. An emerging paradigm is model-distributed inference (MDI), where each worker carries only a subset of DNN layers. In MDI, a source device that has data processes a few layers of DNN and sends the output to a neighboring device. This process ends when all layers are processed in a distributed manner. In this paper, we investigate MDI with multiple sources, i.e., when more than one device has data. We design a multisource MDI (MS-MDI), which optimizes task scheduling decisions across multiple source devices and workers. Experimental results on a real-life testbed of NVIDIA Jetson TX2 edge devices show that MS-MDI improves the inference time significantly as compared to baselines.