Federated Learning for Distributed Reasoning on Edge Computing

The development of the Internet of Things over the last decade has led to large amounts of data being generated at the network edge. This highlights the importance of local data processing and reasoning. Machine learning is most commonly used to automate tasks and perform complex data processing and reasoning. Collecting such data in a centralized location has become increasingly problematic in recent years due to network bandwidth and data privacy concerns. The easy-to-change behavior of edge infrastructure enabled by software-defined networking (SDN) allows IoT data to be gathered on edge servers and gateways, where federated learning (FL) can be performed: creating a centralized model without uploading data to the cloud. In this paper, we analyze the use of edge computing and federated learning, a decentralized machine learning methodology that increases the amount and variety of data used to train deep learning models. To the best of our knowledge, this paper reports the first use of federated learning to help the Microgrid Energy Management System (EMS) predict load and obtain promising results. Simulations were performed using TensorFlow Federated with data from a modified version of the Dataport site.