Latency- and Privacy-Aware Convolutional Neural Network Distributed Inference for Reliable Artificial Intelligence Systems

Reliable artificial intelligence (AI) systems not only propose a challenge on providing intelligent services with high quality for customers but also require customers’ privacy to be protected as much as possible during process of the services. Given the ultrahigh computing load brought by deep-learning-based intelligent services to edge devices and the ultralong distance between edge and cloud, low-latency requirement of intelligent services is hard to meet in single edge computing or cloud computing. Edge–cloud collaborative inference of deep neural networks (DNNs) is considered a feasible solution to the problem. However, former work has not reduced the inference latency to the greatest extent and has not considered privacy protection in distributed systems. To solve the problem, we first establish a novel queue mechanism. Then, the convolution layer split decisions are made based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to realize the parallel inference of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for inference latency reduction. Next, for each CNN, the partition decision is made based on brute force algorithm to further reduce inference latency and protect customers’ privacy. Finally, simulation results show that our method performs better than the existing other methods.