FedDM: Federated Learning Incorporating Dissimilarity Measure for Mobile Edge Computing Systems

Due to the distributed devices in Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) systems, traditional machine learning is not suitable, and federated learning is typically considered instead. In federated learning, there are two critical challenges: 1) the data on distributed learners is heterogeneous, and 2) communication resources within the network are limited. In this work, we propose a framework, Federated Dissimilarity Measure (FedDM), which can be regarded as an adaptively enhanced version of the Federated Proximal (FedProx) algorithm. This adaptiveness is primarily manifested in two aspects: (i) how it adaptively adjusts the proximity between the local models on different learners and the global model; and (ii) how it adaptively aggregates local model parameters. Building on the FedProx model, FedDM incorporates the concept of the Lagrangian multiplier to control the proximal coefficients of different learners, using “parameter dissimilarity" to address data heterogeneity. It explicitly captures the essence of using “loss dissimilarity" to adaptively adjust the aggregation frequency on distributed learners, thereby reducing communication overhead. Theoretically, we provide the performance upper bounds and convergence analysis of our proposed FedDM. Experiment results demonstrate that FedDM allows for higher accuracy and lower communication overhead compared to the baselines across a suite of realistic datasets.