Energy-Efficient Federated Learning With Dynamic Model Pruning for Industrial IoT

With the advent of the Industry 4.0 era, Federated Learning (FL) provides robust data privacy protection for smart manufacturing and supply chain optimization, while facilitating collaborative intelligent optimization across enterprises and devices. However, the complex and overparameterized deep neural networks used in FL result in significant computational overhead for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices, leading to low energy efficiency and hindering the practical deployment of FL on IIoT devices. Moreover, the widespread data and device heterogeneity in the IIoT exacerbates the decrease in energy efficiency caused by inconsistent computational efficiency across nodes. This article proposes an energy-efficient dynamic model pruning method for FL, named EDPrune-FL, to address the aforementioned challenges. Compared to existing methods, this approach offers greater flexibility and efficiency by utilizing a dynamic pruning rate allocation mechanism. This mechanism updates the pruning rate for each participating client in every communication round, allowing the pruning upper bound to adapt to the varying importance of different learning stages in FL. EDPrune-FL ensures the global model’s performance while reducing the training energy consumption of clients in heterogeneous environments. To guarantee that dynamic pruning maintains the stability and effectiveness of the model in heterogeneous environments, we also demonstrated the convergence of EDPrune-FL and discussed the relationship between pruning rates and convergence, providing a qualitative analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art technique across four real-world datasets. With tests conducted on 100 clients, our approach reduces energy consumption by 10% while maintaining comparable accuracy.