Demo: A Practical Testbed for Decentralized Federated Learning on Physical Edge Devices

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, preserving participant privacy. Decentralized FL (DFL) eliminates reliance on a central server, mitigating the single point of failure inherent in the traditional FL paradigm, while introducing deployment challenges on resource-constrained devices. To evaluate real-world applicability, this work designs and deploys a physical testbed using edge devices such as Raspberry Pi and Jetson Nano. The testbed is built upon a DFL training platform, NEBULA, and extends it with a power monitoring module to measure energy consumption during training. Experiments across multiple datasets show that model performance is influenced by the communication topology, with denser topologies leading to better outcomes in DFL settings.

Authors

Publication Details

Journal
Universität Zürich, ZORA
Published
2025-10-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-291193
Primary Topic
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Demo: A Practical Testbed for Decentralized Federated Learning on Physical Edge Devices

Nicolas Huber, Alberto Huertas Celdrán, Chao Feng, Burkhard Stiller et al.
Universität Zürich, ZORA
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
article

Demo: A Practical Testbed for Decentralized Federated Learning on Physical Edge Devices

Nicolas Huber, Alberto Huertas Celdrán, Chao Feng, Burkhard Stiller, Gérôme Bovet
article en

Abstract

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, preserving participant privacy. Decentralized FL (DFL) eliminates reliance on a central server, mitigating the single point of failure inherent in the traditional FL paradigm, while introducing deployment challenges on resource-constrained devices. To evaluate real-world applicability, this work designs and deploys a physical testbed using edge devices such as Raspberry Pi and Jetson Nano. The testbed is built upon a DFL training platform, NEBULA, and extends it with a power monitoring module to measure energy consumption during training. Experiments across multiple datasets show that model performance is influenced by the communication topology, with denser topologies leading to better outcomes in DFL settings.

Universität Zürich, ZORA
Affordable and clean energy
Openalex Percentile: Top 14%
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
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