RoaD-RuNNer: Collaborative DNN partitioning and offloading on heterogeneous edge systems

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are becoming extremely popular for many modern applications deployed at the edge of the computing continuum. Despite their effectiveness, DNNs are typically resource intensive, making it prohibitive to be deployed on resource- and/or energy-constrained devices found in such environments. To overcome this limitation, partitioning and offloading part of the DNN execution from edge devices to more powerful servers has been introduced as a prominent solution. While previous works have proposed resource management schemes to tackle this problem, they usually neglect the high dynamicity found in such environments, both regarding the diversity of the deployed DNN models, as well as the heterogeneity of the underlying hardware infrastructure. In this paper, we present RoaD-RuNNer, a framework for DNN partitioning and offloading for edge computing systems. RoaD-RuNNer relies on its prior knowledge and leverages collaborative filtering techniques to quickly estimate performance and energy requirements of individual layers over heterogeneous devices. By aggregating this information, it specifies a set of Pareto optimal DNN partitioning schemes that trade-off between performance and energy consumption. We evaluate our approach using a set of well-known DNN architectures and show that our framework i) outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by achieving 9.58× speedup on average and up to 88.73% less energy consumption, ii) achieves high prediction accuracy by limiting the prediction error down to 3.19% and 0.18% for latency and energy, respectively and iii) provides lightweight and dynamic performance characteristics.