Joint AAV Deployment and Edge Association for Energy-Efficient Federated Learning

Recently, federated learning (FL) has become a promising distributed learning paradigm that caters to the recent trend of pushing intelligence from the cloud to the edge. Nevertheless, communication bottlenecks and device dropout can lead to inefficient FL in the large network scale, where massive devices cannot be accessed with severely limited network resources. Inspired by the autonomous aerial vehicle (AAV) -assisted mobile edge computing (MEC), we propose the multi-AAV assisted FL design to provide the intermediate model aggregation in the sky. Specifically, we study the problem of joint UAV dePloyment and edge aSsociation (UPS) to minimize the overall energy consumption, which concerns UAV deployment, edge association, and resource allocation. Unfortunately, solving this problem is non-trivial, due to its infinite search space and the complex coupling among mixed optimization variables. To tackle this difficulty, we exploit the FL bundle generation method to reduce candidate locations of AAVs from infinite to finite. Then, we decompose the initial problem and devise an alternating optimization-based algorithm to achieve the optimal resource allocation in the closed form. On this basis, we design a greedy-based approximation algorithm with N performance guarantee for AAV deployment and edge association. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed solution. Compared with five benchmarks, our proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the overall training energy consumption under the training time constraint, while always maintaining better training performance under different parameter settings.