Edge computing has emerged as a pivotal technology, offering significant advantages such as low latency, enhanced data security, and reduced reliance on centralized cloud infrastructure. These benefits are crucial for applications requiring real-time data processing or strict security measures. Despite these advantages, edge devices operating within edge clusters are often underutilized. This inefficiency is mainly due to the absence of a holistic performance profiling mechanism which can help dynamically adjust the desired system configuration for a given workload. Since edge computing environments involve a complex interplay between CPU frequency, power consumption, and application performance, a deeper understanding of these correlations is essential. By uncovering these relationships, it becomes possible to make informed decisions that enhance both computational efficiency and energy savings. To address this gap, this paper evaluates the power consumption and performance characteristics of a single processing node within an edge cluster using a synthetic microbenchmark by varying the workload size and CPU frequency. The results show how an optimal measure can lead to optimized usage of edge resources, given both performance and power consumption.
The field of keypoint extraction, which is essential for vision applications like Structure from Motion (SfM) and Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), has evolved from relying on handcrafted methods to leveraging deep learning techniques. While deep learning approaches have significantly improved performance, they often incur substantial computational costs, limiting their deployment in real-time edge applications. Efforts to create lightweight neural networks have seen some success, yet they often result in trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy. Additionally, the high-dimensional descriptors generated by these networks poses challenges for distributed applications requiring efficient communication and coordination, highlighting the need for compact yet competitively accurate descriptors. In this paper, we present EdgePoint2, a series of lightweight keypoint detection and description neural networks specifically tailored for edge computing applications on embedded system. The network architecture is optimized for efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. To train compact descriptors, we introduce a combination of Orthogonal Procrustes loss and similarity loss, which can serve as a general approach for hypersphere embedding distillation tasks. Additionally, we offer 14 sub-models to satisfy diverse application requirements. Our experiments demonstrate that EdgePoint2 consistently achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy and efficiency across various challenging scenarios while employing lower-dimensional descriptors (32/48/64). Beyond its accuracy, EdgePoint2 offers significant advantages in flexibility, robustness, and versatility. Consequently, EdgePoint2 emerges as a highly competitive option for visual tasks, especially in contexts demanding adaptability to diverse computational and communication constraints.
In recent years, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) technology has attracted much attention in the related research field by virtue of its unique advantage of utilizing single meter data to achieve accurate decomposition of device-level energy consumption. Cutting-edge methods based on machine learning and deep learning have achieved remarkable results in load decomposition accuracy by fusing time-frequency domain features. However, these methods generally suffer from high computational costs and huge memory requirements, which become the main obstacles for their deployment on resource-constrained microcontroller units (MCUs). To address these challenges, this study proposes an innovative Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm in the time-frequency domain and systematically compares and analyzes the performance of six machine learning techniques in home electricity scenarios. Through complete experimental validation on edge MCUs, this scheme successfully achieves a recognition accuracy of 95%. Meanwhile, this study deeply optimizes the frequency domain feature extraction process, which effectively reduces the running time by 55.55% and the storage overhead by about 34.6%. The algorithm performance will be further optimized in future research work. Considering that the elimination of voltage transformer design can significantly reduce the cost, the subsequent research will focus on this direction, and is committed to providing more cost-effective solutions for the practical application of NILM, and providing a solid theoretical foundation and feasible technical paths for the design of efficient NILM systems in edge computing environments.
Oil spill incidents pose severe threats to marine ecosystems and coastal environments, necessitating rapid detection and monitoring capabilities to mitigate environmental damage. In this paper, we demonstrate how artificial intelligence, despite the inherent high computational and memory requirements, can be efficiently integrated into marine pollution monitoring systems. More precisely, we propose a drone-based smart monitoring system leveraging a compressed deep learning U-Net architecture for oil spill detection and thickness estimation. Compared to the standard U-Net architecture, the number of convolution blocks and channels per block are modified. The new model is then trained on synthetic radar data to accurately predict thick oil slick thickness up to 10 mm. Results show that our optimized Tiny U-Net achieves superior performance with an Intersection over Union (IoU) metric of approximately 79%, while simultaneously reducing the model size by a factor of $\sim$269x compared to the state-of-the-art. This significant model compression enables efficient edge computing deployment on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) hardware integrated directly into the drone platform. Hardware implementation demonstrates near real-time thickness estimation capabilities with a run-time power consumption of approximately 2.2 watts. Our findings highlight the increasing potential of smart monitoring technologies and efficient edge computing for operational characterization in marine environments.
The combination of Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enables devices to simultaneously sense the environment and offload data to the base stations (BS) for intelligent processing, thereby reducing local computational burdens. However, transmitting raw sensing data from ISAC devices to the BS often incurs substantial fronthaul overhead and latency. This paper investigates a three-tier collaborative inference framework enabled by Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computing (ISCC), where cloud servers, MEC servers, and ISAC devices cooperatively execute different segments of a pre-trained deep neural network (DNN) for intelligent sensing. By offloading intermediate DNN features, the proposed framework can significantly reduce fronthaul transmission load. Furthermore, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is employed to enhance both sensing quality and offloading efficiency. To minimize the overall sensing task inference latency across all ISAC devices, we jointly optimize the DNN partitioning strategy, ISAC beamforming, and computational resource allocation at the MEC servers and devices, subject to sensing beampattern constraints. We also propose an efficient two-layer optimization algorithm. In the inner layer, we derive closed-form solutions for computational resource allocation using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. Moreover, we design the ISAC beamforming vectors via an iterative method based on the majorization-minimization and weighted minimum mean square error techniques. In the outer layer, we develop a cross-entropy based probabilistic learning algorithm to determine an optimal DNN partitioning strategy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially outperforms existing two-tier schemes in inference latency.
This paper investigates an integrated sensing, communication, and computing system deployed over low-altitude networks for enabling applications within the low-altitude economy. In the considered system, a full-duplex enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is dispatched in the airspace, functioning as a UAV-enabled low-altitude platform (ULAP). The ULAP is capable of achieving simultaneous information transmission, target sensing, and mobile edge computing services. To reduce the overall energy consumption of the system while meeting the sensing beampattern threshold and user computation requirements, we formulate an energy consumption minimization problem by jointly optimizing the task allocation, computation resource allocation, transmit beamforming, and receive beamforming. Since the problem is non-convex and involves highly coupled variables, we propose an efficient algorithm based on alternation optimization, which decomposes the original problem into tractable convex subproblems. Moreover, we analyze the convergence and complexity of the proposed algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme saves up to 54.12\% energy consumption performance compared to the benchmark schemes.
The Transformer architecture has shown significant success in many language processing and visual tasks. However, the method faces challenges in efficiently scaling to long sequences because the self-attention computation is quadratic with respect to the input length. To overcome this limitation, several approaches scale to longer sequences by breaking long sequences into a series of segments, restricting self-attention to local dependencies between tokens within each segment and using a memory mechanism to manage information flow between segments. However, these approached generally introduce additional compute overhead that restricts them from being used for applications where limited compute memory and power are of great concern (such as edge computing). We propose a novel and efficient Compact Recurrent Transformer (CRT), which combines shallow Transformer models that process short local segments with recurrent neural networks to compress and manage a single persistent memory vector that summarizes long-range global information between segments. We evaluate CRT on WordPTB and WikiText-103 for next-token-prediction tasks, as well as on the Toyota Smarthome video dataset for classification. CRT achieves comparable or superior prediction results to full-length Transformers in the language datasets while using significantly shorter segments (half or quarter size) and substantially reduced FLOPs. Our approach also demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the Toyota Smarthome video dataset.
The integration of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technology in 6G Internet of Things (IoT) networks faces significant challenges in remote areas and disaster scenarios where ground infrastructure is unavailable. This paper proposes a novel unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) system enhanced by directional antennas to provide both computational resources and energy support for ground IoT terminals. However, such systems require multiple trade-off policies to balance UAV energy consumption, terminal battery levels, and computational resource allocation under various constraints, including limited UAV battery capacity, non-linear energy harvesting characteristics, and dynamic task arrivals. To address these challenges comprehensively, we formulate a bi-objective optimization problem that simultaneously considers system energy efficiency and terminal battery sustainability. We then reformulate this non-convex problem with a hybrid solution space as a Markov decision process (MDP) and propose an improved soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithm with an action simplification mechanism to enhance its convergence and generalization capabilities. Simulation results have demonstrated that our proposed approach outperforms various baselines in different scenarios, achieving efficient energy management while maintaining high computational performance. Furthermore, our method shows strong generalization ability across different scenarios, particularly in complex environments, validating the effectiveness of our designed boundary penalty and charging reward mechanisms.
Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are integral to intelligent transportation systems, enabling vehicles to offload computational tasks to nearby roadside units (RSUs) and mobile edge computing (MEC) servers for real-time processing. However, the highly dynamic nature of VANETs introduces challenges, such as unpredictable network conditions, high latency, energy inefficiency, and task failure. This research addresses these issues by proposing a hybrid AI framework that integrates supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for intelligent task offloading and resource allocation. The framework leverages supervised models for predicting optimal offloading strategies, reinforcement learning for adaptive decision-making, and PSO for optimizing latency and energy consumption. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves significant reductions in latency and energy usage while improving task success rates and network throughput. By offering an efficient, and scalable solution, this framework sets the foundation for enhancing real-time applications in dynamic vehicular environments.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is transforming transportation by enhancing connectivity and enabling autonomous driving. However, this increased interconnectivity introduces new security vulnerabilities. Bot malware and cyberattacks pose significant risks to Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), as demonstrated by real-world incidents involving remote vehicle system compromise. To address these challenges, we propose an edge-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that monitors network traffic to and from CAVs. Our detection model is based on a meta-ensemble classifier capable of recognizing known (Nday) attacks and detecting previously unseen (zero-day) attacks. The approach involves training multiple Isolation Forest (IF) models on Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) servers, with each IF specialized in identifying a specific type of botnet attack. These IFs, either trained locally or shared by other MEC nodes, are then aggregated using a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based stacking strategy to construct a robust meta-classifier. The proposed IDS has been evaluated on a vehicular botnet dataset, achieving an average detection rate of 92.80% for N-day attacks and 77.32% for zero-day attacks. These results highlight the effectiveness of our solution in detecting both known and emerging threats, providing a scalable and adaptive defense mechanism for CAVs within the IoV ecosystem.
This paper presents a comprehensive evaluation of lightweight deep learning models for image classification, emphasizing their suitability for deployment in resource-constrained environments such as low-memory devices. Five state-of-the-art architectures - MobileNetV3 Small, ResNet18, SqueezeNet, EfficientNetV2-S, and ShuffleNetV2 - are benchmarked across three diverse datasets: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet. The models are assessed using four key performance metrics: classification accuracy, inference time, floating-point operations (FLOPs), and model size. Additionally, we investigate the impact of hyperparameter tuning, data augmentation, and training paradigms by comparing pretrained models with scratch-trained counterparts, focusing on MobileNetV3 Small. Our findings reveal that transfer learning significantly enhances model accuracy and computational efficiency, particularly for complex datasets like Tiny ImageNet. EfficientNetV2 consistently achieves the highest accuracy, while MobileNetV3 offers the best balance between accuracy and efficiency, and SqueezeNet excels in inference speed and compactness. This study highlights critical trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, offering actionable insights for deploying lightweight models in real-world applications where computational resources are limited. By addressing these challenges, this research contributes to optimizing deep learning systems for edge computing and mobile platforms.
Transformer-based models have demonstrated superior performance in various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. However, their enormous model size and high demands in computation, memory, and communication limit their deployment to edge platforms for local, secure inference. Binary transformers offer a compact, low-complexity solution for edge deployment with reduced bandwidth needs and acceptable accuracy. However, existing binary transformers perform inefficiently on current hardware due to the lack of binary specific optimizations. To address this, we introduce COBRA, an algorithm-architecture co-optimized binary Transformer accelerator for edge computing. COBRA features a real 1-bit binary multiplication unit, enabling matrix operations with -1, 0, and +1 values, surpassing ternary methods. With further hardware-friendly optimizations in the attention block, COBRA achieves up to 3,894.7 GOPS throughput and 448.7 GOPS/Watt energy efficiency on edge FPGAs, delivering a 311x energy efficiency improvement over GPUs and a 3.5x throughput improvement over the state-of-the-art binary accelerator, with only negligible inference accuracy degradation.
This paper introduces decentralized and modular neural network framework designed to enhance the scalability, interpretability, and performance of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. At the heart of this framework is a dynamic switch mechanism that governs the selective activation and training of individual neurons based on input characteristics, allowing neurons to specialize in distinct segments of the data domain. This approach enables neurons to learn from disjoint subsets of data, mimicking biological brain function by promoting task specialization and improving the interpretability of neural network behavior. Furthermore, the paper explores the application of federated learning and decentralized training for real-world AI deployments, particularly in edge computing and distributed environments. By simulating localized training on non-overlapping data subsets, we demonstrate how modular networks can be efficiently trained and evaluated. The proposed framework also addresses scalability, enabling AI systems to handle large datasets and distributed processing while preserving model transparency and interpretability. Finally, we discuss the potential of this approach in advancing the design of scalable, privacy-preserving, and efficient AI systems for diverse applications.
Edge computing-based Next-Generation Wireless Networks (NGWN)-IoT offer enhanced bandwidth capacity for large-scale service provisioning but remain vulnerable to evolving cyber threats. Existing intrusion detection and prevention methods provide limited security as adversaries continually adapt their attack strategies. We propose a dynamic attack detection and prevention approach to address this challenge. First, blockchain-based authentication uses the Deoxys Authentication Algorithm (DAA) to verify IoT device legitimacy before data transmission. Next, a bi-stage intrusion detection system is introduced: the first stage uses signature-based detection via an Improved Random Forest (IRF) algorithm. In contrast, the second stage applies feature-based anomaly detection using a Diffusion Convolution Recurrent Neural Network (DCRNN). To ensure Quality of Service (QoS) and maintain Service Level Agreements (SLA), trust-aware service migration is performed using Heap-Based Optimization (HBO). Additionally, on-demand virtual High-Interaction honeypots deceive attackers and extract attack patterns, which are securely stored using the Bimodal Lattice Signature Scheme (BLISS) to enhance signature-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). The proposed framework is implemented in the NS3 simulation environment and evaluated against existing methods across multiple performance metrics, including accuracy, attack detection rate, false negative rate, precision, recall, ROC curve, memory usage, CPU usage, and execution time. Experimental results demonstrate that the framework significantly outperforms existing approaches, reinforcing the security of NGWN-enabled IoT ecosystems
To achieve ubiquitous intelligence in future vehicular networks, artificial intelligence (AI) is essential for extracting valuable insights from vehicular data to enhance AI-driven services. By integrating AI technologies into vehicular edge computing (VEC) platforms, which provide essential storage, computing, and network resources, vehicular edge intelligence (VEI) can be fully realized. Traditional centralized learning, as one of the enabling technologies for VEI, places significant strain on network bandwidth while also increasing latency and privacy concerns. Nowadays, distributed machine learning methods, such as federated learning (FL), split learning (SL), and split federated learning (SFL), are widely applied in vehicular networks to support VEI. However, these methods still face significant challenges due to the mobility and constrained resources inherent in vehicular networks. In this article, we first provide an overview of the system architecture, performance metrics, and challenges associated with VEI design. Then, the adaptive design of SFL, namely adaptive split federated learning (ASFL) is introduced. The proposed ASFL scheme dynamically adapts the cut layer selection process and operates in parallel, optimizing both communication and computation efficiency while improving model performance under non-IID data distribution. Finally, we highlight future research directions to shed the light on the efficient design of SFL.
Understanding how biological neural networks are shaped via local plasticity mechanisms can lead to energy-efficient and self-adaptive information processing systems, which promises to mitigate some of the current roadblocks in edge computing systems. While biology makes use of spikes to seamless use both spike timing and mean firing rate to modulate synaptic strength, most models focus on one of the two. In this work, we present a Hebbian local learning rule that models synaptic modification as a function of calcium traces tracking neuronal activity. We show how the rule reproduces results from spike time and spike rate protocols from neuroscientific studies. Moreover, we use the model to train spiking neural networks on MNIST digit recognition to show and explain what sort of mechanisms are needed to learn real-world patterns. We show how our model is sensitive to correlated spiking activity and how this enables it to modulate the learning rate of the network without altering the mean firing rate of the neurons nor the hyparameters of the learning rule. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that showcases how spike timing and rate can be complementary in their role of shaping the connectivity of spiking neural networks.
The World Health Organization suggests that road traffic crashes cost approximately 518 billion dollars globally each year, which accounts for 3% of the gross domestic product for most countries. Most fatal road accidents in urban areas involve Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Smart cities environments present innovative approaches to combat accidents involving cutting-edge technologies, that include advanced sensors, extensive datasets, Machine Learning (ML) models, communication systems, and edge computing. This paper proposes a strategy and an implementation of a system for road monitoring and safety for smart cities, based on Computer Vision (CV) and edge computing. Promising results were obtained by implementing vision algorithms and tracking using surveillance cameras, that are part of a Smart City testbed, the Aveiro Tech City Living Lab (ATCLL). The algorithm accurately detects and tracks cars, pedestrians, and bicycles, while predicting the road state, the distance between moving objects, and inferring on collision events to prevent collisions, in near real-time.
While convolution and self-attention mechanisms have dominated architectural design in deep learning, this survey examines a fundamental yet understudied primitive: the Hadamard product. Despite its widespread implementation across various applications, the Hadamard product has not been systematically analyzed as a core architectural primitive. We present the first comprehensive taxonomy of its applications in deep learning, identifying four principal domains: higher-order correlation, multimodal data fusion, dynamic representation modulation, and efficient pairwise operations. The Hadamard product's ability to model nonlinear interactions with linear computational complexity makes it particularly valuable for resource-constrained deployments and edge computing scenarios. We demonstrate its natural applicability in multimodal fusion tasks, such as visual question answering, and its effectiveness in representation masking for applications including image inpainting and pruning. This systematic review not only consolidates existing knowledge about the Hadamard product's role in deep learning architectures but also establishes a foundation for future architectural innovations. Our analysis reveals the Hadamard product as a versatile primitive that offers compelling trade-offs between computational efficiency and representational power, positioning it as a crucial component in the deep learning toolkit.
The recent advance of edge computing technology enables significant sensing performance improvement of Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In particular, an edge server (ES) is responsible for gathering sensing data from distributed sensing devices, and immediately executing different sensing tasks to accommodate the heterogeneous service demands of mobile users. However, as the number of users surges and the sensing tasks become increasingly compute-intensive, the huge amount of computation workloads and data transmissions may overwhelm the edge system of limited resources. Accordingly, we propose in this paper a scalable edge sensing framework for multi-task execution, in the sense that the computation workload and communication overhead of the ES do not increase with the number of downstream users or tasks. By exploiting the task-relevant correlations, the proposed scheme implements a unified encoder at the ES, which produces a common low-dimensional message from the sensing data and broadcasts it to all users to execute their individual tasks. To achieve high sensing accuracy, we extend the well-known information bottleneck theory to a multi-task scenario to jointly optimize the information gathering and broadcast processes. We also develop an efficient two-step training procedure to optimize the parameters of the neural network-based codecs deployed in the edge sensing system. Experiment results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the considered representative benchmark methods in multi-task inference accuracy. Besides, the proposed scheme is scalable to the network size, which maintains almost constant computation delay with less than 1% degradation of inference performance when the user number increases by four times.
Hornbills, an iconic species of Malaysia's biodiversity, face threats from habi-tat loss, poaching, and environmental changes, necessitating accurate and real-time population monitoring that is traditionally challenging and re-source intensive. The emergence of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) offers a chance to transform wildlife monitoring by enabling efficient, real-time da-ta analysis directly on edge devices. Addressing the challenge of wildlife conservation, this research paper explores the pivotal role of machine learn-ing, specifically TinyML, in the classification and monitoring of hornbill calls in Malaysia. Leveraging audio data from the Xeno-canto database, the study aims to develop a speech recognition system capable of identifying and classifying hornbill vocalizations. The proposed methodology involves pre-processing the audio data, extracting features using Mel-Frequency Energy (MFE), and deploying the model on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE, which is adept at edge computing. The research encompasses foundational work, in-cluding a comprehensive introduction, literature review, and methodology. The model is trained using Edge Impulse and validated through real-world tests, achieving high accuracy in hornbill species identification. The project underscores the potential of TinyML for environmental monitoring and its broader application in ecological conservation efforts, contributing to both the field of TinyML and wildlife conservation.