A Task Scheduling and Management Platform for Multi-Workload Smart Elderly Care on Pure-Edge CPU-TPU Heterogeneous Nodes
Smart care applications impose increasingly stringent requirements on low-latency execution, privacy preservation, and continuous monitoring. These requirements are driving intelligent services from cloud-centric architectures toward edge-side deployment. When multiple care-related workloads are deployed on resource-constrained edge devices, performance bottlenecks arise not only from model inference itself, but also from process scheduling, inter-process communication, and resource coordination overhead. To address this issue, this paper presents a task scheduling and management platform for multi-workload smart elderly care on a single pure-edge CPU–TPU heterogeneous node. The platform adopts a shared-memory and event-driven synchronization mechanism together with fine-grained process partitioning, thereby establishing a data-sharing and runtime-coordination framework for concurrent multi-workload execution. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed platform, experiments were conducted under single-workload, multi-workload, multi-resolution, and long-term runtime settings. The results show that, compared with two baseline schemes, the proposed platform improves the average frame rate by 66.7% and 71.1%, reduces net memory usage by 96.3% and 45.3%, and lowers net power consumption by 46.8% and 37.7%, respectively, under the single-workload setting. Under 10 concurrent workload instances, the system still maintains a stable frame rate of 42.03 ± 0.73 fps, demonstrating strong concurrency scalability. Multi-resolution experiments further indicate that the performance degradation at higher resolutions is mainly constrained by the front-end data supply stage. A continuous 10-day runtime experiment additionally verifies the sustained operating capability and resource stability of the platform under pure-edge deployment. These results demonstrate that node-level shared-memory and event-driven coordination can effectively improve the execution efficiency, scalability, and stability of real-time multi-workload analytics on such pure-edge heterogeneous nodes, providing a useful basis for future extensions to multi-node edge environments and edge–cloud collaborative task scheduling.
Authors
- Wenxuan Zhu
- Dajiang Yang
- Bochao Su (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8997-8392)
- Tuo Nie
- Xin Guo
Institutions
- Hunan University (CN)
- Shenzhen Polytechnic University (CN)
- Zhejiang Industry Polytechnic College (CN)
- Macao Polytechnic University (MO)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Future Internet
- Published
- 2026-05-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/fi18050242
- Primary Topic
- IoT and Edge/Fog Computing
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- Shenzhen Polytechnic
- Department of Education of Guangdong Province