The cascading neural network: building the Internet of Smart Things

Most of the research on deep neural networks so far has been focused on obtaining higher accuracy levels by building increasingly large and deep architectures. Training and evaluating these models is only feasible when large amounts of resources such as processing power and memory are available. Typical applications that could benefit from these models are, however, executed on resource-constrained devices. Mobile devices such as smartphones already use deep learning techniques, but they often have to perform all processing on a remote cloud. We propose a new architecture called a cascading network that is capable of distributing a deep neural network between a local device and the cloud while keeping the required communication network traffic to a minimum. The network begins processing on the constrained device, and only relies on the remote part when the local part does not provide an accurate enough result. The cascading network allows for an early-stopping mechanism during the recall phase of the network. We evaluated our approach in an Internet of Things context where a deep neural network adds intelligence to a large amount of heterogeneous connected devices. This technique enables a whole variety of autonomous systems where sensors, actuators and computing nodes can work together. We show that the cascading architecture allows for a substantial improvement in evaluation speed on constrained devices while the loss in accuracy is kept to a minimum.