Paper ID: 2111.06061

Edge-Cloud Polarization and Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey for AI

Jiangchao Yao, Shengyu Zhang, Yang Yao, Feng Wang, Jianxin Ma, Jianwei Zhang, Yunfei Chu, Luo Ji, Kunyang Jia, Tao Shen, Anpeng Wu, Fengda Zhang, Ziqi Tan, Kun Kuang, Chao Wu, Fei Wu, Jingren Zhou, Hongxia Yang

Influenced by the great success of deep learning via cloud computing and the rapid development of edge chips, research in artificial intelligence (AI) has shifted to both of the computing paradigms, i.e., cloud computing and edge computing. In recent years, we have witnessed significant progress in developing more advanced AI models on cloud servers that surpass traditional deep learning models owing to model innovations (e.g., Transformers, Pretrained families), explosion of training data and soaring computing capabilities. However, edge computing, especially edge and cloud collaborative computing, are still in its infancy to announce their success due to the resource-constrained IoT scenarios with very limited algorithms deployed. In this survey, we conduct a systematic review for both cloud and edge AI. Specifically, we are the first to set up the collaborative learning mechanism for cloud and edge modeling with a thorough review of the architectures that enable such mechanism. We also discuss potentials and practical experiences of some on-going advanced edge AI topics including pretraining models, graph neural networks and reinforcement learning. Finally, we discuss the promising directions and challenges in this field.

Submitted: Nov 11, 2021