FIDEL: Fog integrated federated learning framework to train neural networks

Abstract

Technological advancement in the digital era has continued to produce voluminous amounts of data through various devices. Even though data is produced distributively, it needs to be accumulated centrally for processing, analysis, and knowledge extraction that faces several challenges such as bandwidth, latency, congestion, privacy, and security. Fog computing paradigm addresses some of these issues, and can be used as a distributed data processing unit. Federated learning trains a shared model over distributed nodes. However, a fog node can not process continuously growing data due to computational limitations. In this paper, we propose FIDEL: a fog integrated federated learning framework for neural network training using resource‐constrained devices. The federation of resource‐constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices creates a shared global model trained on local data, which is generalized on the unseen dataset for prediction/inferences. We have also designed an online training scheme to process continuous data with limited compute resources. The FIDEL supports both synchronous and asynchronous federate learning that empowers resource‐constrained devices to train machine learning models. To test the learning capabilities of the FIDEL, we have trained three neural networks (i) Shallow network; (ii) Deep Network; (iii) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models for human position detection in industrial IoT setup on rapidly changing datasets. The experimental results show that the framework can learn input–output relationships with significantly high accuracy. The overall system efficiency of the framework is reasonable in terms of latency and memory usage for resource‐constrained devices.