KaaS-Edge: Resource-Aware Knowledge Distillation Service for Heterogeneous Wireless Edge Networks

Abstract

Federated distillation (FD) enables collaborative edge learning by exchanging soft predictions rather than model parameters, offering communication efficiency and architectural flexibility. However, deploying FD over heterogeneous wireless networks requires principled methods to schedule device participation and allocate upload volumes under per-round resource constraints. Existing approaches assume uniform participation or rely on heuristic selection, ignoring the coupling among communication cost, computational capability, and privacy posture across devices. This paper proposes KaaS-Edge, a Knowledge-as-a-Service framework that formulates device scheduling as budgeted submodular maximization. We derive an optimal water-filling volume allocation in closed form and present RADS (Resource-Aware Distillation Scheduling), a greedy algorithm with a constant-factor approximation guarantee. Experiments on CIFAR-100 demonstrate that KaaS-Edge achieves accuracy comparable to full-participation baselines while reducing per-round communication by nearly ten times and cumulative bandwidth by over an order of magnitude, with graceful degradation under stringent privacy constraints.