# Towards a Distributed Federated Learning Aggregation Placement using Particle Swarm Intelligence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16227 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16227/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 14 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Towards Federated Learning at Scale: System Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01046/) (2019)
- [Flower: A Friendly Federated Learning Research Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14390/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning in Mobile Edge Networks: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11875/) (2019)
- [FedML: A Research Library and Benchmark for Federated Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13518/) (2020)
- [Federated Learning for Internet of Things: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07914/) (2021)
- [Client-Edge-Cloud Hierarchical Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06641/) (2019)
- [Decentralized Federated Learning: Fundamentals, State of the Art, Frameworks, Trends, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.08413/) (2022)
- [HFEL: Joint Edge Association and Resource Allocation for Cost-Efficient Hierarchical Federated Edge Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11343/) (2020)
- [Semi-Decentralized Federated Learning with Cooperative D2D Local Model Aggregations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10481/) (2021)
- [Federated Learning for Internet of Things: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07494/) (2021)
- [Black-Box Optimization Revisited: Improving Algorithm Selection Wizards through Massive Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04542/) (2020)
- [Fedstellar: A Platform for Decentralized Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.09750/) (2023)
- [Semi-Decentralized Federated Edge Learning with Data and Device Heterogeneity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10313/) (2021)
- [SDFLMQ: A Semi-Decentralized Federated Learning Framework over MQTT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13624/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Federated learning has become a promising distributed learning concept with extra insurance on data privacy. Extensive studies on various models of Federated learning have been done since the coinage of its term. One of the important derivatives of federated learning is hierarchical semi-decentralized federated learning, which distributes the load of the aggregation task over multiple nodes and parallelizes the aggregation workload at the breadth of each level of the hierarchy. Various methods have also been proposed to perform inter-cluster and intra-cluster aggregation optimally. Most of the solutions, nonetheless, require monitoring the nodes' performance and resource consumption at each round, which necessitates frequently exchanging systematic data. To optimally perform distributed aggregation in SDFL with minimal reliance on systematic data, we propose Flag-Swap, a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method that optimizes the aggregation placement according only to the processing delay. Our simulation results show that PSO-based placement can find the optimal placement relatively fast, even in scenarios with many clients as candidates for aggregation. Our real-world docker-based implementation of Flag-Swap over the recently emerged FL framework shows superior performance compared to black-box-based deterministic placement strategies, with about 43% minutes faster than random placement, and 32% minutes faster than uniform placement, in terms of total processing time.