Ruiqi Wang

IoT devices are increasingly the source of data for machine learning (ML) applications running on edge servers. Data transmissions from devices to servers are often over local wireless networks whose bandwidth is not just limited but, more importantly, variable. Furthermore, in cyber-physical systems interacting with the physical environment, image offloading is also commonly subject to timing constraints. It is, therefore, important to develop an adaptive approach that maximizes the inference performance of ML applications under timing constraints and the resource constraints of IoT devices. In this paper, we use image classification as our target application and propose progressive neural compression (PNC) as an efficient solution to this problem. Although neural compression has been used to compress images for different ML applications, existing solutions often produce fixed-size outputs that are unsuitable for timing-constrained offloading over variable bandwidth. To address this limitation, we train a multi-objective rateless autoencoder that optimizes for multiple compression rates via stochastic taildrop to create a compression solution that produces features ordered according to their importance to inference performance. Features are then transmitted in that order based on available bandwidth, with classification ultimately performed using the (sub)set of features received by the deadline. We demonstrate the benefits of PNC over state-of-the-art neural compression approaches and traditional compression methods on a testbed comprising an IoT device and an edge server connected over a wireless network with varying bandwidth.

Contact tracing is a powerful tool for mitigating the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic. Front-line healthcare workers are particularly at high risk of infection in hospital units. This paper presents ContAct TraCing for Hospitals (CATCH), an automated contact tracing system designed specifically for healthcare workers in hospital environments. CATCH employs distributed embedded devices placed throughout a hospital unit to detect close contacts among healthcare workers wearing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. We first identify a set of distinct contact tracing scenarios based on the diverse environmental characteristics of a real-world intensive care unit (ICU) and the different working patterns of healthcare workers in different spaces within the unit. We then develop a suite of novel contact tracing methods tailored for each scenario. CATCH has been deployed and evaluated in the ICU of a major medical center, demonstrating superior accuracy in contact tracing over existing approaches through a wide range of experiments. Furthermore, the real-world case study highlights the effectiveness and efficiency of CATCH compared to standard contact tracing practices.

This article considers a setting where embedded devices are used to acquire and classify images. Because of limited computing capacity, embedded devices rely on a parsimonious classification model with uneven accuracy. When local classification is deemed inaccurate, devices can decide to offload the image to an edge server with a more accurate but resource-intensive model. Resource constraints, e.g., network bandwidth, however, require regulating such transmissions to avoid congestion and high latency. This article investigates this offloading problem when transmissions regulation is through a token bucket, a mechanism commonly used for such purposes. The goal is to devise a lightweight, online offloading policy that optimizes an application-specific metric (e.g., classification accuracy) under the constraints of the token bucket. This article develops a policy based on a deep Q-network (DQN), and demonstrates both its efficacy and the feasibility of its deployment on embedded devices. Of note is the fact that the policy can handle complex input patterns, including correlation in image arrivals and classification accuracy. The evaluation is carried out by performing image classification over a local testbed using synthetic traces generated from the ImageNet image classification benchmark.