Learning-driven decentralized machine learning in resource-constrained wireless edge computing

Data generated at the network edge can be processed locally by leveraging the paradigm of edge computing. To fully utilize the widely distributed data, we concentrate on a wireless edge computing system that conducts model training using decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) methods. However, there are two major challenges on the way towards efficient P2P model training: limited resources (e.g., network bandwidth and battery life of mobile edge devices) and time-varying network connectivity due to device mobility or wireless channel dynamics, which have received less attention in recent years. To address these two challenges, this paper adaptively constructs a dynamic and efficient P2P topology, where model aggregation occurs at the edge devices. In a nutshell, we first formulate the topology construction for P2P learning (TCPL) problem with resource constraints as an integer programming problem. Then a learning-driven method is proposed to adaptively construct a topology at each training epoch. We further give the convergence analysis on training machine learning models even with non-convex loss functions. Extensive simulation results show that our proposed method can improve the model training efficiency by about 11% with resource constraints and reduce the communication cost by about 30% under the same accuracy requirement compared to the benchmarks.