Budget-Prioritized Dynamic Regrouping for Edge Federated Services Under Workload Drift and Privacy-Budget Constraints

Abstract

Federated learning enables model training in edge and distributed service environments without directly sharing raw data. In long-running edge federated services, fixed collaboration structures may become inefficient under workload drift, whereas frequent regrouping can incur migration overhead, group churn, and additional privacy-budget consumption. This paper studies budget-prioritized dynamic regrouping under workload drift, privacy-budget constraints, and migration or reconfiguration cost. We formulate a dynamic regrouping problem that jointly captures workload pressure, remaining privacy budget, service utility, and regrouping cost. We propose Budget-Prioritized Dynamic Regrouping (BP-DR), a triggered local method that evaluates single-node candidate operations and commits at most one regrouping operation per time slot. A candidate is accepted only when it is privacy-budget feasible and its utility improvement exceeds a threshold combining an anti-oscillation margin, migration or reconfiguration cost, and privacy-budget opportunity cost. We derive this trigger from a one-step local comparison and establish its monotonicity with respect to migration or reconfiguration cost and remaining privacy budget. Trace-driven experiments based on Alibaba Cluster Trace 2018 show that BP-DR maintains competitive migration-adjusted utility while controlling regrouping activity across dynamic and stress-test settings. FLamby Fed-Heart-Disease validation further shows similar learning performance across the compared methods while demonstrating the integration of BP-DR with group-aware federated training.