A review of on-device machine learning for IoT: An energy perspective

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Recently, there has been a substantial interest in on-device Machine Learning (ML) models to provide intelligence for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as image classification, human activity recognition, and anomaly detection. Traditionally, ML models are deployed in the cloud or centralized servers to take advantage of their abundant computational resources. However, sharing data with the cloud and third parties degrades privacy and may cause propagation delay in the network due to a large amount of transmitted data impacting the performance of real-time applications. To this end, deploying ML models on-device (i.e., on IoT devices), in which data does not need to be transmitted, becomes imperative. However, deploying and running ML models on already resource-constrained IoT devices is challenging and requires intense energy consumption. Numerous works have been proposed in the literature to address this issue. Although there are considerable works that discuss energy-aware ML approaches for on-device implementation, there remains a gap in the literature on a comprehensive review of this subject. In this paper, we provide a review of existing studies focusing on-device ML models for IoT applications in terms of energy consumption. One of the key contributions of this study is to introduce a taxonomy to define approaches for employing energy-aware on-device ML models on IoT devices in the literature. Based on our review in this paper, our key findings are provided and the open issues that can be investigated further by other researchers are discussed. We believe that this study will be a reference for practitioners and researchers who want to employ energy-aware on-device ML models for IoT applications.