Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications can greatly benefit from leveraging edge computing. For instance, applications relying on deep neural network (DNN) models can be sliced and distributed across IIoT devices and the network edge to reduce inference latency. However, low network performance between IIoT devices and the edge often becomes a bottleneck. In this study, we propose ScissionLite, a holistic framework designed to accelerate distributed DNN inference using lightweight data compression. Our compression method features a novel lightweight down/upsampling network tailored for performance-limited IIoT devices, which is inserted at the slicing point of a DNN model to reduce outbound network traffic without causing a significant drop in accuracy. In addition, we have developed a benchmarking tool to accurately identify the optimal slicing point of the DNN for the best inference latency. ScissionLite improves inference latency by up to 15.7× with minimal accuracy degradation.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enabled effective object detection tasks in bioimages. Unfortunately, implementing such an object detection model can be computationally intensive, especially on resource-limited hardware in a laboratory or hospital setting. This study aims to develop a framework called BioEdge that can accelerate object detection using Scaled-YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 by leveraging edge computing for bioimage analysis. BioEdge employs a distributed inference technique with Scaled-YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 to harness the computational resources of both a local computer and an edge server, enabling rapid detection of COVID-19 abnormalities in chest radiographs. By implementing distributed inference techniques, BioEdge addresses privacy concerns that can arise when transmitting biomedical data to an edge server. Additionally, it incorporates a computationally lightweight autoencoder at the split point to reduce data transmission overhead. For evaluation, this study utilizes the COVID-19 dataset provided by the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM). BioEdge is shown to improve the inference latency of Scaled-YOLOv4 and YOLOv7 by up to 6.28 times with negligible accuracy loss compared to local computer execution in our evaluation setting.