Federated Learning for Energy-balanced Client Selection in Mobile Edge Computing

Mobile edge computing (MEC) has been considered as a promising technology to provide seamless integration of multiple application services. Federated learning (FL) is carried out at edge clients in MEC for privacy-preserving training of data processing models. Despite that the edge clients with small data payloads consume less energy on FL training, the small data payload gives rise to a low learning accuracy due to insufficient input to the FL training. Inadequate selection of the edge clients can result in a large energy consumption at the edge clients, or a low learning accuracy of the FL training. In this paper, a new FL-based client selection optimization is proposed to balance the trade-off between energy consumption of the edge clients and the learning accuracy of FL. We first show that this optimization problem is NP-complete. Next, we propose a FL-based energy-accuracy balancing heuristic algorithm to approximate the optimal client selection in polynomial time. The numerical results show the advantage of our proposed algorithm.