Deep Learning for Edge Computing Applications: A State-of-the-Art Survey

With the booming development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and communication technologies such as 5G, our future world is envisioned as an interconnected entity where billions of devices will provide uninterrupted service to our daily lives and the industry. Meanwhile, these devices will generate massive amounts of valuable data at the network edge, calling for not only instant data processing but also intelligent data analysis in order to fully unleash the potential of the edge big data. Both the traditional cloud computing and on-device computing cannot sufficiently address this problem due to the high latency and the limited computation capacity, respectively. Fortunately, the emerging edge computing sheds a light on the issue by pushing the data processing from the remote network core to the local network edge, remarkably reducing the latency and improving the efficiency. Besides, the recent breakthroughs in deep learning have greatly facilitated the data processing capacity, enabling a thrilling development of novel applications, such as video surveillance and autonomous driving. The convergence of edge computing and deep learning is believed to bring new possibilities to both interdisciplinary researches and industrial applications. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey of the latest efforts on the deep-learning-enabled edge computing applications and particularly offer insights on how to leverage the deep learning advances to facilitate edge applications from four domains, i.e., smart multimedia, smart transportation, smart city, and smart industry. We also highlight the key research challenges and promising research directions therein. We believe this survey will inspire more researches and contributions in this promising field.