From GPU to Microcontroller: Online Ridge Regression for Edge-Deployable Traffic Prediction

Abstract

State-of-the-art traffic flow forecasting models, including Graph Convolutional Networks and graph-less MLPs, require centralized GPU training across all sensors, making them impractical for resource-constrained intelligent transportation deployments. We show that much of this complexity is unnecessary. A parametric analysis of the recent graph-less model GLMST reveals that reducing its internal embedding dimension from 64 to 4 degrades MAPE by less than one percentage point, suggesting that the model's effective capacity far exceeds what the task requires. Motivated by this finding, we replace the neural architecture entirely with per-sensor Ridge regression using horizon-aligned periodic features, combined with Recursive Least Squares (RLS) for online adaptation. With only 444 parameters per sensor (80x fewer than GLMST) and test-time online adaptation, our method achieves the best MAPE on three of four PEMS benchmarks, and remains within one percentage point on the fourth. Because each sensor's model is self-contained and involves only elementary linear algebra, the entire pipeline (training, inference, and online adaptation) runs on edge hardware without a GPU. An ESP32 microcontroller (160 MHz, 520 KB SRAM) completes cold-start training in 7.4s and each predict-and-update in under 2ms with zero heap allocation; a single Raspberry Pi 5 core completes cold-start training in 0.21s and each predict-and-update in 0.26ms.