Energy-aware Resource Management for Federated Learning in Multi-access Edge Computing Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes an energy-aware resource management framework for federated learning in multi-access edge computing systems, balancing model performance, time efficiency, and energy consumption of mobile devices.

Contribution

It formulates a joint optimization problem for resource management in MEC-enabled FL and recasts it as a Generalized Nash Equilibrium Problem to address coupling constraints.

Findings

Joint minimization of training loss and total time achieved.

Offloading dataset impacts energy consumption and training efficiency.

Analysis of resource allocation effects on model and energy performance.

Abstract

In Federated Learning (FL), a global statistical model is developed by encouraging mobile users to perform the model training on their local data and aggregating the output local model parameters in an iterative manner. However, due to limited energy and computation capability at the mobile devices, the performance of the model training is always at stake to meet the objective of local energy minimization. In this regard, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC)-enabled FL addresses the tradeoff between the model performance and the energy consumption of the mobile devices by allowing users to offload a portion of their local dataset to an edge server for the model training. Since the edge server has high computation capability, the time consumption of the model training at the edge server is insignificant. However, the time consumption for dataset offloading from mobile users to the edge server has a significant impact on the total time consumption. Thus, resource management in MEC-enabled FL is challenging, where the objective is to reduce the total time consumption while saving the energy consumption of the mobile devices. In this paper, we formulate an energy-aware resource management for MEC-enabled FL in which the model training loss and the total time consumption are jointly minimized, while considering the energy limitation of mobile devices. In addition, we recast the formulated problem as a Generalized Nash Equilibrium Problem (GNEP) to capture the coupling constraints between the radio resource management and dataset offloading. We then analyze the impact of the dataset offloading and computing resource allocation on the model training loss, time, and the energy consumption.