  Deep-learning-based intelligent services have become prevalent in
cyber-physical applications including smart cities and health-care. Deploying
deep-learning-based intelligence near the end-user enhances privacy protection,
responsiveness, and reliability. Resource-constrained end-devices must be
carefully managed in order to meet the latency and energy requirements of
computationally-intensive deep learning services. Collaborative end-edge-cloud
computing for deep learning provides a range of performance and efficiency that
can address application requirements through computation offloading. The
decision to offload computation is a communication-computation co-optimization
problem that varies with both system parameters (e.g., network condition) and
workload characteristics (e.g., inputs). On the other hand, deep learning model
optimization provides another source of tradeoff between latency and model
accuracy. An end-to-end decision-making solution that considers such
computation-communication problem is required to synergistically find the
optimal offloading policy and model for deep learning services. To this end, we
propose a reinforcement-learning-based computation offloading solution that
learns optimal offloading policy considering deep learning model selection
techniques to minimize response time while providing sufficient accuracy. We
demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution for edge devices in an
end-edge-cloud system and evaluate with a real-setup implementation using
multiple AWS and ARM core configurations. Our solution provides 35% speedup in
the average response time compared to the state-of-the-art with less than 0.9%
accuracy reduction, demonstrating the promise of our online learning framework
for orchestrating DL inference in end-edge-cloud systems.
