Intelligent Device Selection in Federated Edge Learning with Energy Efficiency

Abstract

Due to the increasing demand from mobile devices for the real-time response of cloud computing services, federated edge learning (FEL) emerges as a new computing paradigm, which utilizes edge devices to achieve efficient machine learning while protecting their data privacy. Implementing efficient FEL suffers from the challenges of devices' limited computing and communication resources, as well as unevenly distributed datasets, which inspires several existing research focusing on device selection to optimize time consumption and data diversity. However, these studies fail to consider the energy consumption of edge devices given their limited power supply, which can seriously affect the cost-efficiency of FEL with unexpected device dropouts. To fill this gap, we propose a device selection model capturing both energy consumption and data diversity optimization, under the constraints of time consumption and training data amount. Then we solve the optimization problem by reformulating the original model and designing a novel algorithm, named E2DS, to reduce the time complexity greatly. By comparing with two classical FEL schemes, we validate the superiority of our proposed device selection mechanism for FEL with extensive experimental results. Furthermore, for each device in a real FEL environment, it is the fact that multiple tasks will occupy the CPU at the same time, so the frequency of the CPU used for training fluctuates all the time, which may lead to large errors in computing energy consumption. To solve this problem, we deploy reinforcement learning to learn the frequency so as to approach real value. And compared to increasing data diversity, we consider a more direct way to improve the convergence speed using loss values. Then we formulate the optimization problem that minimizes the energy consumption and maximizes the loss values to select the appropriate set of devices. After reformulating the problem, we design a new algorithm FCE2DS as the solution to have better performance on convergence speed and accuracy. Finally, we compare the performance of this proposed scheme with the previous scheme and the traditional scheme to verify the improvement of the proposed scheme in multiple aspects.