Energy-Efficient Power Control for Multiple-Task Split Inference in UAVs: A Tiny Learning-Based Approach

The limited energy and computing resources of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) hinder the application of aerial artificial intelligence. The utilization of split inference in UAVs garners attention due to its effectiveness in mitigating computing and energy requirements. However, achieving energy-efficient split inference in UAVs remains complex considering of various crucial parameters, such as energy level and delay constraints, especially involving multiple tasks. In this article, we present a two-timescale approach for energy minimization in split inference, where discrete and continuous variables are segregated into two timescales to reduce the size of action space and computational complexity. This segregation enables the utilization of tiny reinforcement learning (TRL) for selecting discrete transmission modes for sequential tasks. Moreover, optimization programming (OP) is embedded between TRL’s output and reward function to optimize the continuous transmit power. Specifically, we replace the optimization of transmit power with that of transmission time to decrease the computational complexity of OP since we reveal that the energy consumption monotonically decreases with increasing transmission time. The replacement significantly reduces the feasible region and enables a fast solution according to the closed-form expression for optimal transmit power. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a higher probability of successful task completion with lower energy consumption.