Distributing Inference Tasks Over Interconnected Systems Through Dynamic DNNs

Journal article, 2025

An increasing number of mobile applications leverage deep neural networks (DNN) as an essential component to adapt to the operational context at hand and provide users with an enhanced experience. It is thus of paramount importance that network systems support the execution of DNN inference tasks in an efficient and sustainable way. Matching the diverse resources available at the mobile-edge-cloud network tiers with the applications requirements and the complexity of their, while minimizing energy consumption, is however challenging. A possible approach to the problem consists in exploiting the emerging concept of dynamic DNNs, characterized by multi-branched architectures with early exits enabling sample-based adaptation of the model depth. We leverage this concept and address the problem of deploying portions of DNNs with early exits across the mobile-edge-cloud system and allocating therein the necessary network, computing, and memory resources. We do so by developing a 3-stage graph-modeling method that allows us to represent the characteristics of the system and the applications as well as the possible options for splitting the DNN over the multi-tier network nodes. Our solution, called Feasible Inference Graph (FIN), can determine the DNN split, deployment, and resource allocation that minimizes the inference energy consumption while satisfying the nodes' constraints and the requirements of multiple, co-existing applications. FIN closely matches the optimum and leads to over 89% energy savings with respect to state-of-the-art alternatives.