Wireless Memory Approximation for Energy-efficient Task-specific IoT Data Retrieval

The use of Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) for storing Machine Learning (ML) models plays a critical role in accelerating ML inference tasks in the next generation of communication systems. However, periodic refreshment of DRAM results in wasteful energy consumption during standby periods, which is significant for resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices. To solve this problem, this work advocates two novel approaches: 1) wireless memory activation and 2) wireless memory approximation. These enable the wireless devices to efficiently manage the available memory by considering the timing aspects and relevance of ML model usage; hence, reducing the overall energy consumption. Numerical results show that our proposed scheme can realize smaller energy consumption than the always-on approach while satisfying the retrieval accuracy constraint.