Federated Learning (FL) is an innovative distributed machine learning paradigm that enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a model without sharing their raw data, thereby preserving data privacy. Communication efficiency concerns arise in cross-silo FL, particularly due to the network heterogeneity and fluctuations associated with geo-distributed silos. Most existing solutions to these problems focus on algorithmic improvements that alter the FL algorithm but sacrificing the training performance. How to address these problems from a network perspective that is decoupled from the FL algorithm remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose FedCod, a new application layer communication protocol designed for cross-silo FL. FedCod transparently utilizes a coding mechanism to enhance the efficient use of idle bandwidth through client-to-client communication, and dynamically adjusts coding redundancy to mitigate network bottlenecks and fluctuations, thereby improving the communication efficiency and accelerating the training process. In our real-world experiments, FedCod demonstrates a significant reduction in average communication time by up to 62% compared to the baseline, while maintaining FL training performance and optimizing inter-client communication traffic.
@article{arxiv.2501.00216,
title = {FedCod: An Efficient Communication Protocol for Cross-Silo Federated Learning with Coding},
author = {Peishen Yan and Jun Li and Hao Wang and Tao Song and Yang Hua and Lu Peng and Haihui Zhou and Haibing Guan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.00216},
year = {2025}
}