Communication and Computation Efficient Split Federated Learning in O-RAN
This work addresses communication and computation inefficiencies in federated learning for O-RAN systems, which is an incremental improvement for network optimization in telecommunications.
The paper tackles the challenge of high communication costs and resource allocation in split federated learning (SFL) for Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN) by proposing SplitMe, a framework that uses mutual learning to eliminate frequent data transfers and optimizes resource usage, resulting in reduced costs and improved convergence compared to existing methods like SFL, FedAvg, and O-RANFed.
The hierarchical architecture of Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) has enabled a new Federated Learning (FL) paradigm that trains models using data from non- and near-real-time (near-RT) Radio Intelligent Controllers (RICs). However, the ever-increasing model size leads to longer training time, jeopardizing the deadline requirements for both non-RT and near-RT RICs. To address this issue, split federated learning (SFL) offers an approach by offloading partial model layers from near-RT-RIC to high-performance non-RT-RIC. Nonetheless, its deployment presents two challenges: (i) Frequent data/gradient transfers between near-RT-RIC and non-RT-RIC in SFL incur significant communication cost in O-RAN. (ii) Proper allocation of computational and communication resources in O-RAN is vital to satisfying the deadline and affects SFL convergence. Therefore, we propose SplitMe, an SFL framework that exploits mutual learning to alternately and independently train the near-RT-RIC's model and the non-RT-RIC's inverse model, eliminating frequent transfers. The ''inverse'' of the inverse model is derived via a zeroth-order technique to integrate the final model. Then, we solve a joint optimization problem for SplitMe to minimize overall resource costs with deadline-aware selection of near-RT-RICs and adaptive local updates. Our numerical results demonstrate that SplitMe remarkably outperforms FL frameworks like SFL, FedAvg and O-RANFed regarding costs and convergence.