SatCooper: Enhancing Cooperative Inference Analytics for Satellite Service via Multi-Exit DNNs

As a key technology of intelligent satellite-enabled services in B5G or 6G networks, deploying Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models on satellites has been a notable trend, catering to the daily demand for extensive computing-intensive and latency-sensitive tasks. The computing resources are strategically deployed on satellites where sensor data is generated or collected, facilitating the fine-grained computational inference of DNN-based tasks. However, no prior study has comprehensively explored the crucial inference challenges – e.g., the trade-off between the number of tasks completed and accuracy and partitioning models in multi-exit models – in the resource-constrained space environment. Effective scheduling frameworks cater to various streams of inference tasks are scarce because inference performance may deviate from the ideal situation due to changes in task system status, such as task profiles and network state. To this end, we first formulate a gain-aware in-orbit computing inference problem to strike a proper trade-off between inference latency and the number of tasks completed by dynamically selecting optimal early exit points and model partitioning points. We propose an offline dynamic programming-based algorithm that provides an effective solution when comprehensive system details are to be predicted. We have developed an online learning-based method to schedule inference tasks with uncertain and dynamic system statuses in real-world situations. Our evaluation shows that, compared to baseline methods, the online learning-based algorithm can improve task gain by an average of 87.3% across various tasks.