DESIGN: Online Device Selection and Edge Association for Federated Synergy Learning-enabled AIoT

The artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) is an emerging technology that enables numerous AIoT devices to participate in big data analytics and machine learning (ML) model training, providing various customized intelligent services for industry manufacturing. Federated learning (FL) empowers AIoT applications with privacy-preserving distributed model training without sharing raw data. However, due to IoT devices’ limited computing and memory resources, existing FL approaches for AIoT applications cannot support efficient large-scale model training. Federated synergy learning (FSyL) is a promising collaborative paradigm that alleviates the computation and communication overhead on resource-constrained AIoT devices via offloading part of the ML model to the edge server for end-to-edge collaborative training. Existing FSyL works neither efficiently address the inter-round device selection to improve model diversity nor determine the intra-round edge association to reduce the training cost, which hinders the applications of FSyL-enable AIoT. Motivated by this issue, this article first investigates the bottlenecks of executing FSyL in AIoT. It builds an optimization model of joint inter-round device selection and intra-round edge association for balancing model diversity and training cost. To tackle the intractable coupling problem, we present a framework named Online DEvice SelectIon and EdGe AssociatioN for Cost-Diversity Tradeoffs FSyL (DESIGN). First, the edge association subproblem is extracted from the original problem, and game theory determines the optimal association decision for an arbitrary device selection. Then, based on the optimal association decision, device selection is modeled as a combinatorial multi-armed bandit (CMAB) problem. Finally, we propose an online mechanism to obtain joint DESIGN decisions. The performance of DESIGN is theoretically analyzed and experimentally evaluated on real-world datasets. The results show that DESIGN can achieve up to \(84.3\%\) in cost-saving with an accuracy improvement of \(23.6\%\) compared with the state-of-the-art.