Federated learning (FL) is capable of performing large distributed machine
learning tasks across multiple edge users by periodically aggregating trained
local parameters. To address key challenges of enabling FL over a wireless
fog-cloud system (e.g., non-i.i.d. data, users' heterogeneity), we first
propose an efficient FL algorithm based on Federated Averaging (called FedFog)
to perform the local aggregation of gradient parameters at fog servers and
global training update at the cloud. Next, we employ FedFog in wireless
fog-cloud systems by investigating a novel network-aware FL optimization
problem that strikes the balance between the global loss and completion time.
An iterative algorithm is then developed to obtain a precise measurement of the
system performance, which helps design an efficient stopping criteria to output
an appropriate number of global rounds. To mitigate the straggler effect, we
propose a flexible user aggregation strategy that trains fast users first to
obtain a certain level of accuracy before allowing slow users to join the
global training updates. Extensive numerical results using several real-world
FL tasks are provided to verify the theoretical convergence of FedFog. We also
show that the proposed co-design of FL and communication is essential to
substantially improve resource utilization while achieving comparable accuracy
of the learning model.

本文通过提出一种基于联邦平均的高效 FL（FedFog）算法，结合一种新型的面向网络的 FL 优化问题，提高了资源利用率并在保证学习精度的同时，通过采用用户聚合策略，缓解慢用户的影响，并减小了时间开销。对多项真实 FL 任务的数值结果进行了广泛的理论收敛验证和实际应用展示。