Balanced Energy Consumption Based on Historical Participation of Resource-Constrained Devices in Federated Edge Learning

Abstract

In recent years, Federated Edge Learning has gained interest from both industry and academia for deployment at the wireless network edge. However, some resource-restricted edge devices (EDs) bear more computation and communication loads due to the heterogeneity of data and resources. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to reduce energy costs by scheduling only a few EDs to complete training tasks based on their energy budgets. Nevertheless, from a practical perspective, the incongruent data distribution cannot be captured, resulting in a biased model for EDs that are frequently selected. Furthermore, the frequently scheduled devices deplete their energy quickly, making them inaccessible. Thus, this paper proposes a novel scheduling policy based on the historical participation of each ED that ensures an unbiased model while balancing learning tasks so that all EDs consume equivalent energy at the end of the training. We formulate an optimization problem based on Jain's fairness index, followed by tractable algorithms to solve this problem. Extensive experiments have been conducted, and the results show that the proposed algorithm balances the energy consumption among EDs and accelerates the convergence rate while achieving satisfactory performance.