Federated Learning for Resource-Constrained IoT Devices: Panoramas and State-of-the-art

Abstract

Nowadays, devices are equipped with advanced sensors with higher processing/computing capabilities. Further, widespread Internet availability enables communication among sensing devices. As a result, vast amounts of data are generated on edge devices to drive Internet-of-Things (IoT), crowdsourcing, and other emerging technologies. The collected extensive data can be pre-processed, scaled, classified, and finally, used for predicting future events using machine learning (ML) methods. In traditional ML approaches, data is sent to and processed in a central server, which encounters communication overhead, processing delay, privacy leakage, and security issues. To overcome these challenges, each client can be trained locally based on its available data and by learning from the global model. This decentralized learning structure is referred to as Federated Learning (FL). However, in large-scale networks, there may be clients with varying computational resource capabilities. This may lead to implementation and scalability challenges for FL techniques. In this paper, we first introduce some recently implemented real-life applications of FL. We then emphasize on the core challenges of implementing the FL algorithms from the perspective of resource limitations (e.g., memory, bandwidth, and energy budget) of client clients. We finally discuss open issues associated with FL and highlight future directions in the FL area concerning resource-constrained devices.