Client-Edge-Cloud Hierarchical Federated Learning

Federated Learning is a collaborative machine learning framework to train a deep learning model without accessing clients’ private data. Previous works assume one central parameter server either at the cloud or at the edge. The cloud server can access more data but with excessive communication overhead and long latency, while the edge server enjoys more efficient communications with the clients. To combine their advantages, we propose a client-edge-cloud hierarchical Federated Learning system, supported with a HierFAVG algorithm that allows multiple edge servers to perform partial model aggregation. In this way, the model can be trained faster and better communication-computation trade-offs can be achieved.…