HED-FL: A hierarchical, energy efficient, and dynamic approach for edge Federated Learning

The increasing data produced by IoT devices and the need to harness intelligence in our environments impose the shift of computing and intelligence at the edge, leading to a novel computing paradigm called Edge Intelligence/Edge AI. This paradigm combines Artificial Intelligence and Edge Computing, enables the deployment of machine learning algorithms to the edge, where data is generated, and is able to overcome the drawbacks of a centralized approach based on the cloud (e.g., performance bottleneck, poor scalability, and single point of failure). Edge AI supports the distributed Federated Learning (FL) model that maintains local training data at the end devices and shares only globally learned model parameters in the cloud. This paper proposes a novel, energy-efficient, and dynamic FL-based approach considering a hierarchical edge FL architecture called HED-FL, which supports a sustainable learning paradigm using model parameters aggregation at different layers and considering adaptive learning rounds at the edge to save energy but still preserving the learning model’s accuracy. Performance evaluations of the proposed approach have also been led out considering model accuracy, loss, and energy consumption.