Towards On-Demand Deployment of Multiple Clients and Heterogeneous Models in Federated Learning

In this paper, we increase the availability and integration of devices and models together in the learning process to enhance the convergence of federated learning (FL) models. The majority of the literature suggested client selection techniques to accelerate convergence and boost accuracy. However, none of the existing proposals have focused on the flexibility to deploy and select clients as needed, wherever and whenever that may be while serving multiple FL models. Due to the extremely dynamic surroundings, some devices are actually not available to serve as clients in FL, which affects the availability of data for learning and the applicability of the existing solution for client selection. In this paper, we address the aforementioned limitations by introducing an On-Demand-FL, a client deployment approach for FL, offering more volume and heterogeneity of data in the learning process while supporting multiple models. We make use of the containerization technology such as Docker to build efficient environments using IoT and mobile devices serving as volunteers. Furthermore, Kubernetes is used for orchestration. The performed experiments using the Mobile Data Challenge (MDC), MNIST, KDD datasets, and the Localfed framework illustrate the relevance of the proposed approach and the efficiency of the on-the-fly deployment of clients with less discarded rounds and more available data of each running FL application.