Computation-aware Energy-harvesting Federated Learning with Pipelined Cyclic Scheduling

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) is a powerful paradigm for distributed learning, but increasing model complexity leads to significant energy consumption from client-side computations for local training. This challenge is critical in energy-harvesting FL (EHFL) systems, where the participation availability of each device fluctuates because of limited energy. To address this, we propose PipeCycle, a battery-aware distributed learning framework that organizes clients into pipelined cyclic groups. When a group completes its intra-group aggregation, its aggregated model is relayed directly to a newly formed group as a reference for local training, allowing multiple groups to coexist in the pipeline while overlapping client recharging periods with active training in other pipeline stages. We provide a convergence analysis of PipeCycle under a realistic energy consumption model in which local training spans multiple time slots, and show that the cyclic structure of the pipeline imposes a finite-horizon staleness bound that avoids the exponential factors typical of asynchronous FL analyses. Numerical experiments across both IID and non-IID data and various battery charging probabilities show that PipeCycle reaches a target accuracy with substantially lower cumulative energy than existing FL baselines, particularly under severe label skew where competing cyclic schemes collapse to near-chance accuracy.