Computational Offloading and Delay Minimization for UAV-aided Edge Federated Learning

The Internet of things (IoT) applications are generating large volumes of data, and processing this data securely, reliably, and timely is required for effective decision-making. However, the limited processing capability of IoT devices is a significant bottleneck in processing these datasets. A potential solution to overcome this challenge is federated learning using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as mobile edge computing (MEC) servers. In this paper, we propose a UAV-aided edge federated learning (UAFL) framework where we utilize UAV-MEC's computation capacity to process some portion of the datasets from the straggling devices (devices which are unable to process their dataset in reasonable time and are lagging, increasing delay in the whole system). We formulate an optimization problem to minimize system delay considering UAV-MEC's computation power, computation and communication power of IoT devices, and quality of service constraints. We transform the proposed problem by introducing auxiliary variables and epigraph form and then solve the problem using concurrent deterministic simplex with root relaxation algorithm. Simulation results show that UAFL outperforms the traditional federated learning and edge-based learning system by approximately 5%.