Reliable adaptive edge-cloud collaborative DNN inference acceleration scheme combining computing and communication resources in optical networks

With the continuous development of the Artificial Intelligence of Things, deep neural network (DNN) models require a larger amount of computing capacity. The emerging edge-cloud collaboration architecture in optical networks is proposed as an effective solution, which combines edge computing with cloud computing to provide faster response and reduce the cloud load for compute-intensive tasks. The multi-layered DNN model can be divided into subtasks that are offloaded to edge and cloud servers for computation in this architecture. In addition, as bearer networks for computing capacity, once a server or link in optical networks fails, a large amount of data can be lost, so the robust reliability of the edge-cloud collaborative optical networks is very important. To solve the above problems, we design a reliable adaptive edge-cloud collaborative DNN inference acceleration scheme (RACAI) combining computing and communication resources. We formulate the RACAI into a mixed integer linear programming model and develop a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm (MADRL-RACIA) to jointly optimize DNN task partitioning, offloading, and protection. The simulation results show that compared with the benchmark schemes, the proposed MADRL-RACIA can provide a guarantee of reliability for more tasks under latency constraints and reduce the blocking probability.