A Survey on Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning strategy that generates a global model by learning from multiple decentralized edge clients. FL enables on-device training, keeping the client’s local data private, and further, updating the global model based on the local model updates. While FL methods offer several advantages, including scalability and data privacy, they assume there are available computational resources at each edge-device/client. However, the Internet-of-Things (IoT)-enabled devices, e.g., robots, drone swarms, and low-cost computing devices (e.g., Raspberry Pi), may have limited processing ability, low bandwidth and power, or limited storage capacity. In this survey article, we propose to answer this question: how to train distributed machine learning models for resource-constrained IoT devices? To this end, we first explore the existing studies on FL, relative assumptions for distributed implementation using IoT devices, and explore their drawbacks. We then discuss the implementation challenges and issues when applying FL to an IoT environment. We highlight an overview of FL and provide a comprehensive survey of the problem statements and emerging challenges, particularly during applying FL within heterogeneous IoT environments. Finally, we point out the future research directions for scientists and researchers who are interested in working at the intersection of FL and resource-constrained IoT environments.

I. Introduction

In this section, we explain the motivation to conduct a comprehensive survey on federated learning (FL) for resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, followed by recently published prior works, and differentiate how our proposed survey is necessary for the FL domain. After that, we discuss our contributions and the necessity of conducting this research. Finally, at the end of this section, we briefly highlight the organization of this article.