A neural-network-based realization of in-network computation for the Internet of Things

Ultra-dense Internet of Things (IoT) networks and machine type communications herald an enormous opportunity for new computing paradigms and are serving as a catalyst for profound change in the evolution of the Internet. We explore leveraging the communication within IoT to serve data processing by appropriately shaping the aggregate behavior of a network to parallel more traditional computation methods. This paper presents an element of this vision, whereby we map the operations of an artificial neural network onto the communication of an IoT network for simultaneous data processing and transfer. That is, we provide a framework to treat a network holistically as an artificial neural network, rather than placing neural networks within the network. The operation of components of a neural network, neurons and connections between neurons, are performed by the various elements of the IoT network, i.e., the devices and their connections. The proposed approach reduces the latency in delivering processed information and supports the locality of information inherent to IoT by removing the need for transfer to remote data processing sites.