Federated Learning for Energy-Efficient Task Computing in Wireless Networks

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of minimizing energy consumption for task computation and transmission in a cellular network with mobile edge computing (MEC) capabilities is studied. In the considered network, each user needs to process a computational task at each time slot. A part of the task can be transmitted to a base station (BS) that can use its powerful computational ability to process the tasks offloaded from its users. Since the data size of each user's computational task varies over time, the BSs must dynamically adjust the resource allocation scheme to meet the users' needs. This problem is posed as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the energy consumption for task computing and transmission via adjusting user association scheme as well as their task and power allocation scheme. To solve this problem, a support vector machine (SVM)-based federated learning (FL) is proposed to determine the user association proactively. Given the user association, the BS can collect the information related to the computational tasks of its associated users using which, the transmit power and task allocation of each user will be optimized and the energy consumption of each user is also minimized. The proposed SVM-based FL method enables the BS and users to cooperatively build a global SVM model that can determine all users' association without any transmission of users' historical association and computational task offloading. Simulations using real data on city cellular traffic from the OMNILab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the users' energy consumption by up to 20.1% compared to the conventional centralized SVM method.