Privacy-Preserving Coded Mobile Edge Computing for Low-Latency Distributed Inference

TL;DR

This paper introduces a privacy-preserving coding scheme for mobile edge computing that ensures data privacy against colluding servers, reduces latency, and mitigates stragglers in distributed inference tasks.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel coding scheme combining Shamir's secret sharing and replication to achieve privacy and low latency in edge computing.

Findings

Reduces latency by 8% compared to nonprivate schemes

Provides information-theoretic privacy against colluding servers

Mitigates straggler effects in distributed inference

Abstract

We consider a mobile edge computing scenario where a number of devices want to perform a linear inference $\boldsymbol{W}\boldsymbol{x}$ on some local data $\boldsymbol{x}$ given a network-side matrix $\boldsymbol{W}$. The computation is performed at the network edge over a number of edge servers. We propose a coding scheme that provides information-theoretic privacy against $z$ colluding (honest-but-curious) edge servers, while minimizing the overall latency\textemdash comprising upload, computation, download, and decoding latency\textemdash in the presence of straggling servers. The proposed scheme exploits Shamir's secret sharing to yield data privacy and straggler mitigation, combined with replication to provide spatial diversity for the download. We also propose two variants of the scheme that further reduce latency. For a considered scenario with $9$ edge servers, the proposed scheme reduces the latency by $8\%$ compared to the nonprivate scheme recently introduced by Zhang and Simeone, while providing privacy against an honest-but-curious edge server.