On the Design of Federated Learning in the Mobile Edge Computing Systems

The combination of artificial intelligence and mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered as a promising evolution path of the future wireless networks. As a model-level coordination learning paradigm, federated learning can make full use of the distributed computation resource in the MEC systems, which allows the users to keep their private data locally. However, due to the unreliable wireless transmission circumstances and resource constraints in the MEC systems, both the performance and training efficiency of federated learning cannot be guaranteed. To solve this problem, the optimization design of federated learning in the MEC systems is studied in this paper. First, an optimization problem is formulated to manage the tradeoff between model accuracy and training cost. Second, a joint optimization algorithm is designed to optimize the model compression, sample selection, and user selection strategies, which can approach a stationary optimal solution in a computationally efficient way. Finally, the performance of our proposed optimization scheme is evaluated by numerical simulation and experiment results, which show that both the accuracy loss and the cost of federated learning in the MEC systems can be reduced significantly by employing our proposed algorithm.