A Safe Genetic Algorithm Approach for Energy Efficient Federated Learning in Wireless Communication Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a genetic algorithm-based method to reduce energy consumption in federated learning over wireless networks, balancing environmental impact with model performance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel safe genetic algorithm approach that optimizes resource allocation for energy-efficient federated learning in wireless environments.

Findings

Achieves up to 83% reduction in total energy consumption.

Effectively balances energy efficiency with model performance.

Outperforms two state-of-the-art baseline solutions.

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a decentralized technique, where contrary to traditional centralized approaches, devices perform a model training in a collaborative manner, while preserving data privacy. Despite the existing efforts made in FL, its environmental impact is still under investigation, since several critical challenges regarding its applicability to wireless networks have been identified. Towards mitigating the carbon footprint of FL, the current work proposes a Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach, targeting the minimization of both the overall energy consumption of an FL process and any unnecessary resource utilization, by orchestrating the computational and communication resources of the involved devices, while guaranteeing a certain FL model performance target. A penalty function is introduced in the offline phase of the GA that penalizes the strategies that violate the constraints of the environment, ensuring a safe GA process. Evaluation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme compared to two state-of-the-art baseline solutions, achieving a decrease of up to 83% in the total energy consumption.