An official website of the United States government
With the wider adoption of edge computing services, intelligent edge devices, and high-speed V2X communication, compute-intensive tasks for autonomous vehicles, such as object detection using camera, LiDAR, and/or radar data, can be partially offloaded to road-side edge servers. However, data privacy becomes a major concern for vehicular edge computing, as sensitive sensor data from vehicles can be observed and used by edge servers. We aim to address the privacy problem by protecting both vehicles’ sensor data and the detection results. In this paper, we present vehicle–edge cooperative deep-learning networks with privacy protection for object-detection tasks, named vePOD for short. In vePOD, we leverage the additive secret sharing theory to develop secure functions for every layer in an object-detection convolutional neural network (CNN). A vehicle’s sensor data is split and encrypted into multiple secret shares, each of which is processed on an edge server by going through the secure layers of a detection network. The detection results can only be obtained by combining the partial results from the participating edge servers. We have developed proof-of-concept detection networks with secure layers: vePOD Faster R-CNN (two-stage detection) and vePOD YOLO (single-stage detection). Experimental results on public datasets show that vePOD does not degrade the accuracy of object detection and, most importantly, it protects data privacy for vehicles. The execution of a vePOD object-detection network with secure layers is orders of magnitude faster than the existing approaches for data privacy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that targets privacy protection in object-detection tasks with vehicle–edge cooperative computing.
more »
« less
This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Characterizing Perception Deep Learning Algorithms and Applications for Vehicular Edge Computing
Vehicular edge computing relies on the computational capabilities of interconnected edge devices to manage incoming requests from vehicles. This offloading process enhances the speed and efficiency of data handling, ultimately boosting the safety, performance, and reliability of connected vehicles. While previous studies have concentrated on processor characteristics, they often overlook the significance of the connecting components. Limited memory and storage resources on edge devices pose challenges, particularly in the context of deep learning, where these limitations can significantly affect performance. The impact of memory contention has not been thoroughly explored, especially regarding perception-based tasks. In our analysis, we identified three distinct behaviors of memory contention, each interacting differently with other resources. Additionally, our investigation of Deep Neural Network (DNN) layers revealed that certain convolutional layers experienced computation time increases exceeding 2849%, while activation layers showed a rise of 1173.34%. Through our characterization efforts, we can model workload behavior on edge devices according to their configuration and the demands of the tasks. This allows us to quantify the effects of memory contention. To our knowledge, this study is the first to characterize the influence of memory on vehicular edge computational workloads, with a strong emphasis on memory dynamics and DNN layers.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2231519
- PAR ID:
- 10574076
- Publisher / Repository:
- Algorithms
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Algorithms
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1999-4893
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 31
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Deep neural networks (DNNs) are being applied to various areas such as computer vision, autonomous vehicles, and healthcare, etc. However, DNNs are notorious for their high computational complexity and cannot be executed efficiently on resource constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Various solutions have been proposed to handle the high computational complexity of DNNs. Offloading computing tasks of DNNs from IoT devices to cloud/edge servers is one of the most popular and promising solutions. While such remote DNN services provided by servers largely reduce computing tasks on IoT devices, it is challenging for IoT devices to inspect whether the quality of the service meets their service level objectives (SLO) or not. In this paper, we address this problem and propose a novel approach named QIS (quality inspection sampling) that can efficiently inspect the quality of the remote DNN services for IoT devices. To realize QIS, we design a new ID-generation method to generate data (IDs) that can identify the serving DNN models on edge servers. QIS inserts the IDs into the input data stream and implements sampling inspection on SLO violations. The experiment results show that the QIS approach can reliably inspect, with a nearly 100% success rate, the service qualtiy of remote DNN services when the SLA level is 99.9% or lower at the cost of only up to 0.5% overhead.more » « less
-
Conventionally, DNN models are trained once in the cloud and deployed in edge devices such as cars, robots, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for real-time inference. However, there are many cases that require the models to adapt to new environments, domains, or users. In order to realize such domain adaption or personalization, the models on devices need to be continuously trained on the device. In this work, we design EF-Train, an efficient DNN training accelerator with a unified channel-level parallelism-based convolution kernel that can achieve end-to-end training on resource-limited low-power edge-level FPGAs. It is challenging to implement on-device training on resource-limited FPGAs due to the low efficiency caused by different memory access patterns among forward and backward propagation and weight update. Therefore, we developed a data reshaping approach with intra-tile continuous memory allocation and weight reuse. An analytical model is established to automatically schedule computation and memory resources to achieve high energy efficiency on edge FPGAs. The experimental results show that our design achieves 46.99 GFLOPS and 6.09 GFLOPS/W in terms of throughput and energy efficiency, respectively.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)There is an increasing emphasis on securing deep learning (DL) inference pipelines for mobile and IoT applications with privacy-sensitive data. Prior works have shown that privacy-sensitive data can be secured throughout deep learning inferences on cloud-offloaded models through trusted execution environments such as Intel SGX. However, prior solutions do not address the fundamental challenges of securing the resource-intensive inference tasks on low-power, low-memory devices (e.g., mobile and IoT devices), while achieving high performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose SecDeep, a low-power DL inference framework demonstrating that both security and performance of deep learning inference on edge devices are well within our reach. Leveraging TEEs with limited resources, SecDeep guarantees full confidentiality for input and intermediate data, as well as the integrity of the deep learning model and framework. By enabling and securing neural accelerators, SecDeep is the first of its kind to provide trusted and performant DL model inferencing on IoT and mobile devices. We implement and validate SecDeep by interfacing the ARM NN DL framework with ARM TrustZone. Our evaluation shows that we can securely run inference tasks with 16× to 172× faster performance than no acceleration approaches by leveraging edge-available accelerators.more » « less
-
Mobile devices such as smartphones and autonomous vehicles increasingly rely on deep neural networks (DNNs) to execute complex inference tasks such as image classification and speech recognition, among others. However, continuously executing the entire DNN on mobile devices can quickly deplete their battery. Although task offloading to cloud/edge servers may decrease the mobile device’s computational burden, erratic patterns in channel quality, network, and edge server load can lead to a significant delay in task execution. Recently, approaches based on split computing (SC) have been proposed, where the DNN is split into a head and a tail model, executed respectively on the mobile device and on the edge server. Ultimately, this may reduce bandwidth usage as well as energy consumption. Another approach, called early exiting (EE), trains models to embed multiple “exits” earlier in the architecture, each providing increasingly higher target accuracy. Therefore, the tradeoff between accuracy and delay can be tuned according to the current conditions or application demands. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state of the art in SC and EE strategies by presenting a comparison of the most relevant approaches. We conclude the article by providing a set of compelling research challenges.more » « less
