Surviving the Edge: Federated Learning under Networking and Resource Constraints

TL;DR

This paper systematically characterizes transport-layer failures in federated learning systems under network and resource constraints, revealing critical thresholds where standard TCP management fails and proposing adjustments for reliable edge deployment.

Contribution

It is the first to empirically analyze transport-layer issues in FL under constrained conditions and demonstrates how TCP parameter tuning can improve robustness.

Findings

FL fails at 5s latency due to TCP timeouts

Packet loss over 50% causes training failure

Adjusting TCP parameters reduces training time in high-latency scenarios

Abstract

Motivated by the growing proliferation of federated learning (FL) in edge environments, we present the first systematic characterization of transport-layer breaking points in FL systems operating under conditions of highly constrained network and compute resources. Using a reproducible testbed with chaos engineering tools, we evaluate Flower under progressively degraded network conditions representative of resource-constrained deployments in Africa and similar environments. Our empirical investigation reveals a fundamental mismatch between FL's burst-idle communication pattern and standard TCP connection management. We identify precise operational boundaries: FL training catastrophically fails at 5-second one-way latency due to TCP handshake timeouts, above 50% packet loss due to buffer exhaustion, and with 90% client dropout rates. Through systematic analysis of connection patterns during training rounds, we demonstrate that FL's periodic model update bursts, separated by extended local training periods, violate the assumptions underlying default TCP configurations. To validate the significance of these findings, we show that adjusting just three TCP connection management parameters can significantly reduce training time under extreme latency, proving that transport-layer awareness is not merely beneficial but essential for FL deployment at the network edge. Our characterization methodology and findings provide practitioners with concrete thresholds for determining when standard FL deployments will fail and when advanced reliability techniques become necessary.