arrow
Return

FHE-EESI: A Lightweight Fully Homomorphic Encryption-Based End-Edge Collaborative Split Inference Framework

delete2026-07-20
delete0
PRE
AI
H
Haiyue Zhang
Y
Yiming Liu
J
Jing Jin
Y
Yanlu Li
R
Rui Meng
J
Jiaqi Wang
S
Siyuan Zheng
DOI:10.1109/tccn.2026.3714807delete
deleteOriginal
deleteOriginal request for help
deleteShare
deleteSave
Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
End-edge collaborative inference has emerged as an important trend for deploying deep learning applications on resource-constrained end devices. However, the continuous data interaction between end devices and edge server inevitably raises privacy concerns. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) provides a privacy-preserving solution by enabling inference directly on encrypted data, but deploying full FHE inference on the edge suffers from high latency. To address these issues, we propose FHE-EESI, an FHE-based end-edge collaborative split inference framework. In FHE-EESI, the end device executes the initial layers on plaintext, encrypts intermediate features using the residue number system Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (RNS-CKKS) scheme, and transmits them to the edge server for the remaining FHE inference. To construct an FHE-compatible inference network and enable flexible partitionability, we adopt a stage-wise key management strategy and the Chebyshev polynomial approximation. Furthermore, considering dynamic channel conditions and heterogeneous computational capabilities, we design a dueling double deep Q-network (D3QN)-based dynamic split mechanism to adaptively determine the optimal split point. Experimental results on the CIFAR-10 dataset show that FHE-EESI achieves 83.3% inference accuracy and 183.1 s total latency, effectively providing privacy-preserving inference while maintaining inference efficiency.
Keywords:
Fully homomorphic encryption
end-edge collaboration
split inference
privacy-preserving
deep neural network

Journal

I
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking
IF:
7
Papers:
1.5K
Citations:
5.5K

Organization

C
china mobile research institute
Scholars:
235
Papers: 103
Citations: 0
B
beijing university of posts and telecommunications
Scholars:
2.1K
Papers: 779
Citations: 0