Task Partitioning and Offloading in DNN-Task Enabled Mobile Edge Computing Networks

Deep neural network (DNN)-task enabled mobile edge computing (MEC) is gaining ubiquity due to outstanding performance of artificial intelligence. By virtue of characteristics of DNN, this paper develops a joint design of task partitioning and offloading for a DNN-task enabled MEC network that consists of a single server and multiple mobile devices (MDs), where the server and each MD employ the well-trained DNNs for task computation. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, we propose a layer-level computation partitioning strategy for DNN to partition each MD's task into the subtasks that are either locally computed at the MD or offloaded to the server. Second, we develop a delay prediction model for DNN to characterize the computation delay of each subtask at the MD and the server. Third, we design a slot model and a dynamic pricing strategy for the server to efficiently schedule the offloaded subtasks. Fourth, we jointly optimize the design of task partitioning and offloading to minimize each MD's cost that includes the computation delay, the energy consumption, and the price paid to the server. In particular, we propose two distributed algorithms based on the aggregative game theory to solve the optimization problem. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is scalable to different types of DNNs and shows the superiority over the baseline schemes in terms of processing delay and energy consumption.