Research · Intelligent Surveillance over 5G Edge
Edge inference is a bandwidth contract, not a compute flex
Edge AI · 5G · Real-time inference
For real-time video analytics over 5G, moving every frame to the cloud breaks latency budgets. But blind edge-only deployment wastes power when uplink is cheap and models are large.
Setup
We compared edge vs centralized inference under variable bandwidth, frame rates, and model sizes—optimizing for end-to-end latency, not single-node FLOPS.
Finding
Lightweight detectors belong at the edge; heavy re-identification or fusion stages can ride the network when QoS allows. The crossover point moved with compression and burst traffic—not with peak Gbps alone.
Why it matters
Systems design for autonomy and robotics faces the same tradeoff: locality is policy. You schedule compute where the data already is—and where the SLA still holds.