A Survey of Recent Advances in Edge-Computing-Powered Artificial Intelligence of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has created a ubiquitously connected world powered by a multitude of wired and wireless sensors generating a variety of heterogeneous data over time in a myriad of fields and applications. To extract complete information from these data, advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technology, especially deep learning (DL), has proved successful in facilitating data analytics, future prediction and decision making. The collective integration of AI and the IoT has greatly promoted the rapid development of AI-of-Things (AIoT) systems that analyze and respond to external stimuli more intelligently without involvement by humans. However, it is challenging or infeasible to process massive amounts of data in the cloud due to the destructive impact of the volume, velocity, and veracity of data and fatal transmission latency on networking infrastructures. These critical challenges can be adequately addressed by introducing edge computing. This article conducts an extensive survey of an end-edge-cloud orchestrated architecture for flexible AIoT systems. Specifically, it begins with articulating fundamental concepts including the IoT, AI and edge computing. Guided by these concepts, it explores the general AIoT architecture, presents a practical AIoT example to illustrate how AI can be applied in real-world applications and summarizes promising AIoT applications. Then, the emerging technologies for AI models regarding inference and training at the edge of the network are reviewed. Finally, the open challenges and future directions in this promising area are outlined.