A Framework for Sustainable Federated Learning

Potential environmental impact of machine learning in large-scale wireless networks is a major challenge for the sustainability of next-generation intelligent systems. Federated learning is a recent framework for communication-efficient training of machine learning models over the data collected, stored, and processed by millions of wireless devices. In this paper, we introduce a sustainable machine learning framework for federated learning, using rechargeable devices that can collect energy from the ambient environment. In particular, we propose a practical federated learning framework that utilizes intermittent energy arrivals for training, with provable convergence guarantees. Our framework can be applied to both cross-device and cross-silo federated learning settings, including federated learning in wireless edge networks and the Internet-of-Things. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework can provide significant performance improvement over the benchmark energy-agnostic federated learning settings.