Decentralized Distributed Sequential Neural Networks Inference on Low-Power Microcontrollers in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Predictive Maintenance Case Study

The growing adoption of IoT applications has led to increased use of low-power microcontroller units (MCUs) for energy-efficient, local data processing. However, deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on these constrained devices is challenging due to limitations in memory, computational power, and energy. Traditional methods like cloud-based inference and model compression often incur bandwidth, privacy, and accuracy trade-offs. This paper introduces a novel Decentralized Distributed Sequential Neural Network (DDSNN) designed for low-power MCUs in Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) applications. Unlike the existing methods that rely on centralized cluster-based approaches, DDSNN partitions a pre-trained LeNet across multiple MCUs, enabling fully decentralized inference in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We validate DDSNN in a real-world predictive maintenance scenario, where vibration data from an industrial pump is analyzed in real-time. The experimental results demonstrate that DDSNN achieves 99.01% accuracy, explicitly maintaining the accuracy of the non-distributed baseline model and reducing inference latency by approximately 50%, highlighting its significant enhancement over traditional, non-distributed approaches, demonstrating its practical feasibility under realistic operating conditions.