To Compute or not to Compute? Adaptive Smart Sensing in Resource-Constrained Edge Computing

Bibliographic Details
Title: To Compute or not to Compute? Adaptive Smart Sensing in Resource-Constrained Edge Computing
Authors: Ballotta, Luca, Peserico, Giovanni, Zanini, Francesco, Dini, Paolo
Source: IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 736-749, 2024
Publication Year: 2022
Collection: Computer Science
Subject Terms: Computer Science - Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing, Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science - Robotics, 93C43 (Primary), 93E10, 68T05, 68T40 (Secondary), K.6.3, K.6.4, I.2.9, I.2.11
More Details: We consider a network of smart sensors for an edge computing application that sample a time-varying signal and send updates to a base station for remote global monitoring. Sensors are equipped with sensing and compute, and can either send raw data or process them on-board before transmission. Limited hardware resources at the edge generate a fundamental latency-accuracy trade-off: raw measurements are inaccurate but timely, whereas accurate processed updates are available after processing delay. Hence, one needs to decide when sensors should transmit raw measurements or rely on local processing to maximize network monitoring performance. To tackle this sensing design problem, we model an estimation-theoretic optimization framework that embeds both computation and communication latency, and propose a Reinforcement Learning-based approach that dynamically allocates computational resources at each sensor. Effectiveness of our proposed approach is validated through numerical experiments motivated by smart sensing for the Internet of Drones and self-driving vehicles. In particular, we show that, under constrained computation at the base station, monitoring performance can be further improved by an online sensor selection.
Comment: 16 pages, 17 figures; submitted to IEEE TNSE; final accepted version
Document Type: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1109/TNSE.2023.3306202
Access URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.02166
Accession Number: edsarx.2209.02166
Database: arXiv
More Details
DOI:10.1109/TNSE.2023.3306202