FlocOff: Data Heterogeneity Resilient Federated Learning with Communication-Efficient Edge Offloading

TL;DR

FlocOff introduces a federated learning framework that leverages edge device offloading to address data heterogeneity and resource constraints, significantly improving convergence and accuracy in non-IID data scenarios.

Contribution

This paper proposes FlocOff, a novel offloading-based federated learning framework that decouples optimization for data reshaping and resource allocation, enhancing scalability and adaptability.

Findings

Improves model convergence and accuracy by up to 32.7%.

Reduces data heterogeneity across diverse data distributions.

Effectively balances communication costs and computational efficiency.

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a fundamental learning paradigm to harness massive data scattered at geo-distributed edge devices in a privacy-preserving way. Given the heterogeneous deployment of edge devices, however, their data are usually Non-IID, introducing significant challenges to FL including degraded training accuracy, intensive communication costs, and high computing complexity. Towards that, traditional approaches typically utilize adaptive mechanisms, which may suffer from scalability issues, increased computational overhead, and limited adaptability to diverse edge environments. To address that, this paper instead leverages the observation that the computation offloading involves inherent functionalities such as node matching and service correlation to achieve data reshaping and proposes Federated learning based on computing Offloading (FlocOff) framework, to address data heterogeneity and resource-constrained challenges. Specifically, FlocOff formulates the FL process with Non-IID data in edge scenarios and derives rigorous analysis on the impact of imbalanced data distribution. Based on this, FlocOff decouples the optimization in two steps, namely : (1) Minimizes the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence via Computation Offloading scheduling (MKL-CO); (2) Minimizes the Communication Cost through Resource Allocation (MCC-RA). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FlocOff effectively improves model convergence and accuracy by 14.3\%-32.7\% while reducing data heterogeneity under various data distributions.