CCSFLF: Cloud‐edge‐terminal collaborative self‐adaptive federated learning framework

Summary This article addresses the issue of ensuring model accuracy and training efficiency in a constrained federated learning environment. In an actual federated learning environment, each device's software, hardware, and network conditions are heterogeneous. Some terminal devices may not be able to undertake the work assigned by the server, resulting in poor model accuracy and slower convergence speed. However, existing research cannot ensure that each terminal device participating in training can handle the workload allocated by the system without collecting too much equipment information. This article proposes the cloud‐edge‐terminal collaborative self‐adaptive federated learning framework (CCSFLF) to solve this problem. This framework combines the advantages of federated learning and edge computing, reduces the probability that devices cannot handle the workload of system allocation, solves the system heterogeneity, and improves the efficiency of federated learning. CCSFLF can adaptively adjust the number of training tasks for terminal devices and select valuable training participants using a terminal device selection strategy. Multiple edge servers can simultaneously aggregate local models. Cloud servers are responsible for the aggregation and task distribution of global models. The above strategy enables the framework to have a faster convergence rate and higher model accuracy. The experimental results confirm that this framework can reduce the dropout rate of terminal devices by more than 5% in heterogeneous federated learning systems, improve the model accuracy by about 2%, and reduce the training time by 1/3 compared with similar methods, with better performance and applicability.