Enhancing Training Efficiency for Cloud-Edge Collaboration in the Industrial Internet of Things: A Transmission-Centric Approach

With the development of intelligent edge computing (IEC) in industrial IoT (IIoT), there is a growing number of service providers trying to leverage computing resources in the cloud and at the edge to meet the users‘ demand for low latency and high reliability in diversified applications. This evolving landscape necessitates innovative approaches to manage and process the vast amounts of data generated by IIoT devices. Among these approaches, distributed learning frameworks, such as federated learning (FL), have emerged as popular solutions. However, compared to computing, communication remains the primary bottleneck that constrains the speed of federated model training. Most of the previous solutions have focused on reducing communication overhead. Differently, we propose a transmission-centric approach by designing an efficient communication archi-tecture for FL with cloud-edge collaboration, specifically aimed at enhancing communication capabilities through multi-path transmission. We deploy this FL system in a real environment and conduct extensive testing. The results demonstrate that the new approach can significantly reduce communication time in FL setting, thereby enhancing model aggregation efficiency and shortening the overall training duration. Compared to conventional single-path transmission, the proposed solution improves training efficiency by up to 26.4%.