Abstract
With the Internet of Things technology, almost any remote sensing devices, wearables, and smart objects are equipped to transmit large volumes of data in continuous streams. In conventional cloud-centric analytics, all the raw data is transferred to a data centre and processed in real-time, near real-time, or in batches. However, this approach is usually not very responsive to real-time analytics due to the latency in transmission alongside network traffic, bandwidth and data transmission costs. To tackle this, edge-enhanced analytics ensures that raw data can be preprocessed at the edge and sent across the network channel in a more compact form. A specific category of deep learning model, autoencoder, can help to achieve this by transforming high-dimensional data into compact representation. We propose an edge-enhanced framework which deploys a deep autoencoder model on the network edge for data compression. After training of models in the cloud, the encoder part of the autoencoder is deployed on the edge for data reduction while the decoder remains on the cloud to reconstruct the data for an image classification task on the cloud. We applied supervised fine-tuning using the intrinsic dimensionality of the data to achieve an accuracy that surpasses the baseline cloud model. The solution was explored in the context of an image recognition problem using the MNIST and FASHION-MNIST datasets. The framework was validated on an event simulator to estimate the network savings of the proposed method in terms of bandwidth and latency. The edge-enhanced approach saves up to 74% bandwidth compared to the centralised analytics. In addition, real-time analytics is further improved by taking 25% less time to complete the task.