Distributed Neural Networks for Internet of Things: The Big-Little Approach

Nowadays deep neural networks are widely used to accurately classify input data. An interesting application area is the Internet of Things (IoT), where a massive amount of sensor data has to be classified. The processing power of the cloud is attractive, however the variable latency imposes a major drawback in situations where near real-time classification is required. In order to exploit the apparent trade-off between utilizing the stable but limited embedded computing power of IoT devices and the seemingly unlimited computing power of Cloud computing at the cost of higher and variable latency, we propose a Big-Little architecture for deep neural networks. A small neural network trained to a subset of prioritized output classes is running on the embedded device, while a more specific classification is calculated when required by a large neural network in the cloud. We show the applicability of this concept in the IoT domain by evaluating our approach for state of the art neural network classification problems on popular embedded devices such as the Raspberry Pi and Intel Edison.