VREM-FL: Mobility-Aware Computation-Scheduling Co-Design for Vehicular Federated Learning

Assisted and autonomous driving are rapidly gaining momentum, and will soon become a reality. Among their key enablers, artificial intelligence and machine learning are expected to play a prominent role, also thanks to the massive amount of data that smart vehicles will collect from their onboard sensors. In this domain, federated learning is one of the most effective and promising techniques for training global machine learning models, while preserving data privacy at the vehicles and optimizing communications resource usage. In this work, we propose VREM-FL, a computation-scheduling co-design for vehicular federated learning that leverages mobility of vehicles in conjunction with estimated 5G radio environment maps. VREM-FL jointly optimizes the global model learned at the server while wisely allocating communication resources. This is achieved by orchestrating local computations at the vehicles in conjunction with the transmission of their local model updates in an adaptive and predictive fashion, by exploiting radio channel maps. The proposed algorithm can be tuned to trade model training time for radio resource usage. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of utilizing radio maps. VREM-FL outperforms literature benchmarks for both a linear regression model (learning time reduced by 28%) and a deep neural network for a semantic image segmentation task (doubling the number of model updates within the same time window).

Divide and Save: Splitting Workload Among Containers in an Edge Device to Save Energy and Time

The increasing demand for edge computing is leading to a rise in energy consumption from edge devices, which can have significant environmental and financial implications. To address this, in this paper we present a novel method to enhance the energy efficiency while speeding up computations by distributing the workload among multiple containers in an edge device. Experiments are conducted on two Nvidia Jetson edge boards, the TX2 and the AGX Orin, exploring how using a different number of containers can affect the energy consumption and the computational time for an inference task. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our splitting approach, a video object detection task is conducted using an embedded version of the state-of-the-art YOLO algorithm, quantifying the energy and the time savings achieved compared to doing the computations on a single container. The proposed method can help mitigate the environmental and economic consequences of high energy consumption in edge computing, by providing a more sustainable approach to managing the workload of edge devices.