Accelerating federated learning for IoT in big data analytics with pruning, quantization and selective updating

The ever-increasing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are continuously generating huge masses of data, but the current cloud-centric approach for IoT big data analysis has raised public concerns on both data privacy and network cost. Federated learning (FL) recently emerges as a promising technique to accommodate these concerns, by means of learning a global model by aggregating local updates from multiple devices without sharing the privacy-sensitive data. However, IoT devices usually have constrained computation resources and poor network connections, making it infeasible or very slow to train deep neural networks (DNNs) by following the FL pattern. To address this problem, we propose a new efficient FL framework called FL-PQSU in this paper. It is composed of 3-stage pipeline: structured pruning, weight quantization and selective updating, that work together to reduce the costs of computation, storage, and communication to accelerate the FL training process. We study FL-PQSU using popular DNN models (AlexNet, VGG16) and publicly available datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10), and demonstrate that it can well control the training overhead while still guaranteeing the learning performance. © 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved.