This paper explores the practical implementation and performance analysis of distributed learning (DL) frameworks on various client platforms, responding to the dynamic landscape of 6G technology and the pressing need for a fully connected distributed intelligence network for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The heterogeneous nature of clients and data presents challenges for effective federated learning (FL) techniques, prompting our exploration of federated transfer learning (FTL) on Raspberry Pi, Odroid, and virtual machine platforms. Our study provides a detailed examination of the design, implementation, and evaluation of the FTL framework, specifically adapted to the unique constraints of various IoT platforms. By measuring the accuracy of FTL across diverse clients, we reveal its superior performance over traditional FL, particularly in terms of faster training and higher accuracy, due to the use of transfer learning (TL). Real-world measurements further demonstrate improved resource efficiency with lower average load, memory usage, temperature, power, and energy consumption when FTL is implemented compared to FL. Our experiments also showcase FTL’s robustness in scenarios where users leave the server’s communication coverage, resulting in fewer clients and less data for training. This adaptability underscores the effectiveness of FTL in environments with limited data, clients, and resources, contributing valuable information to the intersection of edge computing and DL for the 6G IoT.

The fast-rising demand for wireless bandwidth requires rapid evolution of high-performance baseband processing infrastructure. Programmable many-core processors for software-defined radio (SDR) have emerged as high-performance baseband processing engines, offering the flexibility required to capture evolving wireless standards and technologies. This trend must be supported by a design framework enabling functional validation and end-to-end performance analysis of SDR hardware within realistic radio environment models. We propose a static binary translation based simulator augmented with a fast, approximate timing model of the hardware and coupled to wireless channel models to simulate the most performance-critical physical layer functions implemented in software on a many (1024) RISC-V cores cluster customized for SDR. Our framework simulates the detection of a 5G OFDM-symbol on a server-class processor in 9.5s-3min, on a single thread, depending on the input MIMO size (three orders of magnitude faster than RTL simulation). The simulation is easily parallelized to 128 threads with 73-121x speedup compared to a single thread.