A Full Compression Pipeline for Green Federated Learning in Communication-Constrained Environments

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive compression pipeline for federated learning that significantly reduces communication costs and resource usage while maintaining accuracy, enabling scalable and sustainable FL in bandwidth-limited environments.

Contribution

The authors introduce a unified end-to-end compression framework combining pruning, quantization, and Huffman encoding for federated learning, with a holistic evaluation of efficiency trade-offs.

Findings

Over 11× reduction in model size with only 2% accuracy loss.

More than 60% faster training in a bandwidth-constrained scenario.

Effective in both IID and non-IID data settings.

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, thereby preserving privacy. However, FL often suffers from significant communication and computational overhead, limiting its scalability and sustainability. In this work, we introduce a Full Compression Pipeline (FCP) for FL in communication-constrained environments. FCP integrates three complementary deep compression techniques (pruning, quantization, and Huffman encoding) into a unified end-to-end framework. By compressing local models and communication payloads, FCP substantially reduces transmission costs and resource consumption while maintaining competitive accuracy. To quantify its impact, we develop an evaluation framework that captures both communication and computation overheads as a unified model cost, allowing a holistic assessment of efficiency trade-offs. The pipeline is evaluated in an independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-IID data setting. In one representative scenario, training a ResNet-12 model on the CIFAR-10 dataset with ten clients and a 2 Mbps bandwidth, the FCP achieves more than 11$\times$ reduction in model size, with only a 2% drop in accuracy compared to the uncompressed baseline. This results in an FL training that is more than 60% faster.