Computation and Communication Co-scheduling for Timely Multi-Task Inference at the Wireless Edge

Abstract: In multi-task remote inference systems, an intelligent receiver (e.g., command center) performs multiple inference tasks (e.g., target detection) using data features received from several remote sources (e.g., edge sensors). Key challenges to facilitating timely inference in these systems arise from (i) limited computational power of the sources to produce features from their inputs, and (ii) limited communication resources of the channels to carry simultaneous feature transmissions to the receiver. We develop a novel computation and communication co-scheduling methodology which determines feature generation and transmission scheduling to minimize inference errors subject to these resource constraints. Specifically, we formulate the co-scheduling problem as a weakly-coupled Markov decision process with Age of Information (AoI)-based timeliness gauging the inference errors. To overcome its PSPACE-hard complexity, we analyze a Lagrangian relaxation of the problem, which yields gain indices assessing the improvement in inference error for each potential feature generation-transmission scheduling action. Based on this, we develop a maximum gain first (MGF) policy which we show is asymptotically optimal for the original problem as the number of inference tasks increases. Experiments demonstrate that MGF obtains significant improvements over baseline policies for varying tasks, channels, and sources.