MASM: A Multiple-algorithm Service Model for Energy-delay Optimization in Edge Artificial Intelligence

Edge computing has emerged as a promising technique because of its advantages in providing low-latency computation offloading services for resource-limited mobile user devices and Internet of Things applications. Computationally intensive artificial intelligence (AI) tasks are well suited to be offloaded to the Cloudlet server, but there is a lack of energy-delay optimization models specifically designed for this edge AI scenario. In this paper, we propose a multiple algorithm service model (MASM) that provides heterogeneous algorithms with different computation complexities and required data sizes to fulfill the same task, and develop an optimization model that aims at reducing the energy and delay cost by optimizing the workload assignment weights and computing capacities of virtual machines, at the same time guaranteeing the quality of the results (QoRs). We propose a tide ebb algorithm to solve the MASM optimization model, and we prove its Parato optimality. Numerical results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, and prove that the energy and delay costs can be significantly reduced by sacrificing the QoR of the offloaded AI tasks.