A Comprehensive Survey on Communication-Efficient Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Environments

Abstract

In traditional centralized machine learning, transmitting raw data to a cloud center incurs high communication costs and raises privacy concerns. This is particularly challenging in mobile edge environments, where devices are dynamic and resource-constrained. Federated Learning (FL) addresses these issues by allowing devices to train models locally and upload parameters to a central server without sharing local data. However, limited wireless channel resources and dynamic transmission performance make communication overhead a major bottleneck of FL in mobile edge environments. Concerning this challenge, this survey provides a comprehensive summary of methods to improve communication efficiency in FL, focusing on: 1) minimizing communication complexity to reduce total transmission volume, 2) scheduling resources appropriately to improve training efficiency, 3) utilizing over-the-air computation (OTA) to integrate computation into communication for accommodating the computation/communication characteristics of FL in mobile edge environments. Thus, this work analyzes research from the perspective of convergence and data heterogeneity to reduce communication rounds by optimizing algorithm performance. We hope that this survey could offer insights into communication-efficient FL for future research.