Quantization Impact on the Accuracy and Communication Efficiency Trade-off in Federated Learning for Aerospace Predictive Maintenance
Federated learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving predictive maintenance across distributed aerospace fleets, but gradient communication overhead constrains deployment on bandwidth-limited IoT nodes. This paper investigates the impact of symmetric uniform quantization ($b in {32,8,4,2}$ bits) on the accuracy–efficiency trade-off of a custom-designed lightweight 1-D convolutional model (AeroConv1D, 9,697 parameters) trained via FL on the NASA C-MAPSS benchmark under a realistic Non-IID client partition. Using a rigorous multi-seed evaluation ($N=10$ seeds), we show that INT4 achieves accuracy emph{statistically indistinguishable} from […]