Data Collection and Acceleration Infrastructure for FPGA-based Edge AI Applications

As data being produced by IoT applications continues to explode, there's a growing need to bring computing power closer to the source of the data to meet the response-time, power-consumption and cost goals of performance-critical applications like Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Automated Driving, Medical Imaging or Surveillance among others. This paper proposes a FPGA-based data collection and utilization framework that allows runtime platform and application data to be sent to an edge and cloud system via data collection agents running close to the platform. Agents are connected to a cloud system able to train AI models to improve overall energy efficiency of an AI application executed on a FPGA-based edge platform. In the implementation part we show that it is feasible to collect relevant data from an FPGA platform, transmit the data to a cloud system for processing and receiving feedback actions to execute an edge AI application energy efficiently. As future work we foresee the possibility to train, deploy and continuously improve a base model able to efficiently adapt the execution of edge applications.