Sniper: cloud-edge collaborative inference scheduling with neural network similarity modeling

The cloud-edge collaborative inference demands scheduling the artificial intelligence (AI) tasks efficiently to the appropriate edge smart device. However, the continuously iterative deep neural networks (DNNs) and heterogeneous devices pose great challenges for inference tasks scheduling. In this paper, we propose a self-update cloud-edge collaborative inference scheduling system (Sniper) with time awareness. At first, considering that similar networks exhibit similar behaviors, we develop a non-invasive performance characterization network (PCN) based on neural network similarity (NNS) to accurately predict the inference time of DNNs. Moreover, PCN and time-based scheduling algorithms can be flexibly combined into the scheduling module of Sniper. Experimental results show that the average relative error of network inference time prediction is about 8.06%. Compared with the traditional method without time awareness, Sniper can reduce the waiting time by 52% on average while achieving a stable increase in throughput.