DACFL: Dynamic Average Consensus-Based Federated Learning in Decentralized Sensors Network

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving way to utilize the sensitive data generated by smart sensors of user devices, where a central parameter server (PS) coordinates multiple user devices to train a global model. However, relying on centralized topology poses challenges when applying FL in a sensors network, including imbalanced communication congestion and possible single point of failure, especially on the PS. To alleviate these problems, we devise a Dynamic Average Consensus-based Federated Learning (DACFL) for implementing FL in a decentralized sensors network. Different from existing studies that replace the model aggregation roughly with neighbors’ average, we first transform the FL model aggregation, which is the most intractable in a decentralized topology, into the dynamic average consensus problem by treating a local training procedure as a discrete-time series.We then employ the first-order dynamic average consensus (FODAC) to estimate the average model, which not only solves the model aggregation for DACFL but also ensures model consistency as much as possible. To improve the performance with non-i.i.d data, each user also takes the neighbors’ average model as its next-round initialization, which prevents the possible local over-fitting. Besides, we also provide a basic theoretical analysis of DACFL on the premise of i.i.d data. The result validates the feasibility of DACFL in both time-invariant and time-varying topologies and declares that DACFL outperforms existing studies, including CDSGD and D-PSGD, in most cases. Take the result on Fashion-MNIST as a numerical example, with i.i.d data, our DACFL achieves 19∼34% and 3∼10% increases in average accuracy; with non-i.i.d data, our DACFL achieves 30∼50% and 0∼10% increases in average accuracy, compared to CDSGD and D-PSGD.