Mingyuan Zang

The limited computation resources of mobile devices hinders the real-time Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference, which is critical in many Internet of Things (IoT) applications. To meet the real-time responses demands, the cloud-end collaborative DNN inference is promising, which partially offloads the inference workloads from mobile devices to the cloud server with powerful computation resources through wireless networks. However, in many IoT applications, the wireless networks are of poor link conditions with high packet loss rates, which has posed a substantial obstacle to the intermediate feature transmission. In such scenarios, it is rather challenging to achieve efficient and resilient collaborative DNN inference. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by proposing a Resilient Collaborative DNN inference framework, named RCNet, to maintain high accuracy under high packet loss conditions in wireless networks. It leverages an unequal redundant encoding mechanism to efficiently prioritize the successful transmission of important features on the mobile devices, and a Transformer-based feature reconstruction module to fully leverage the powerful computation resources on the cloud server to recover the missing features. We implement a real-world testbed and conduct extensive experiments. The experimental results verify that RCNet enables robust collaborative inference with an accuracy surpassing 90%, even under extremely harsh network conditions with over 90% of features being lost.

The expanding use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) has driven machine learning (ML)-based traffic analysis. 5G networks’ standards, requiring low-latency communications for time-critical services, pose new challenges to traffic analysis. They necessitate fast analysis and response, preventing service disruption or security impact on network infrastructure. Distributed intelligence on IoT edge has been studied to analyze traffic, but introduces delays and raises privacy concerns. Federated learning can address privacy concerns, but does not meet latency requirements. In this article, we propose FLIP4: an efficient federated learning-based framework for in-network traffic analysis. Our solution introduces a lightweight federated tree-based model, offloaded and running within network devices. FLIP4 consumes less resources than previous solutions and reduces communication overheads, making it well-suited for IoT edge traffic analysis. It ensures prompt mitigation and minimal impact on services in the presence of false alerts using two approaches (metering and dropping), thereby balancing learning accuracy and privacy requirements.

In-network computing provides significant performance benefits, load reduction, and power savings. Still, an in-network service's functionality is strictly limited to a single hardware device. Research has focused on enabling on-device functionality, with limited consideration to distributed in-network computing. This paper explores the applicability of distributed computing to in-network computing. We present DINC, a framework enabling distributed in-network computing, generating deployment strategies, overcoming resource constraints and providing functionality guarantees across a network. It uses multi-objective optimization to provide a deployment strategy, slicing P4 programs accordingly. DINC was evaluated using seven different workloads on both data center and wide-area network topologies, demonstrating feasibility and scalability, providing efficient distribution plans within seconds.

The widespread use of IoT devices has unveiled overlooked security risks. With the advent of ultrareliable low-latency communications (URLLCs) in 5G, fast threat defense is critical to minimize damage from attacks. IoT gateways, equipped with wireless/wired interfaces, serve as vital frontline defense against emerging threats on IoT edge. However, current gateways struggle with dynamic IoT traffic and have limited defense capabilities against attacks with changing patterns. In-network computing offers fast machine learning (ML)-based attack detection and mitigation within network devices, but leveraging its capability in IoT gateways requires new continuous learning capability and runtime model updates. In this work, we present P4Pir, a novel in-network traffic analysis framework for IoT gateways. P4Pir incorporates programmable data plane into IoT gateway, pioneering the utilization of in-network ML inference for fast mitigation. It facilitates continuous and seamless updates of in-network inference models within gateways. P4Pir is prototyped in P4 language on raspberry pi and Dell Edge Gateway. With ML inference offloaded to gateway’s data plane, P4Pir’s in-network approach achieves swift attack mitigation and lightweight deployment compared to prior ML-based solutions. Evaluation results using three public data sets show that P4Pir accurately detects and fastly mitigates emerging attacks (>30% accuracy improvement and submillisecond mitigation time). The proposed model updates method allows seamless runtime updates without disrupting network traffic.