No Arabic abstract
Federated learning (FL) has recently emerged as a promising technology to enable artificial intelligence (AI) at the network edge, where distributed mobile devices collaboratively train a shared AI model under the coordination of an edge server. To significantly improve the communication efficiency of FL, over-the-air computation allows a large number of mobile devices to concurrently upload their local models by exploiting the superposition property of wireless multi-access channels. Due to wireless channel fading, the model aggregation error at the edge server is dominated by the weakest channel among all devices, causing severe straggler issues. In this paper, we propose a relay-assisted cooperative FL scheme to effectively address the straggler issue. In particular, we deploy multiple half-duplex relays to cooperatively assist the devices in uploading the local model updates to the edge server. The nature of the over-the-air computation poses system objectives and constraints that are distinct from those in traditional relay communication systems. Moreover, the strong coupling between the design variables renders the optimization of such a system challenging. To tackle the issue, we propose an alternating-optimization-based algorithm to optimize the transceiver and relay operation with low complexity. Then, we analyze the model aggregation error in a single-relay case and show that our relay-assisted scheme achieves a smaller error than the one without relays provided that the relay transmit power and the relay channel gains are sufficiently large. The analysis provides critical insights on relay deployment in the implementation of cooperative FL. Extensive numerical results show that our design achieves faster convergence compared with state-of-the-art schemes.
Federated edge learning (FEEL) has emerged as a revolutionary paradigm to develop AI services at the edge of 6G wireless networks as it supports collaborative model training at a massive number of mobile devices. However, model communication over wireless channels, especially in uplink model uploading of FEEL, has been widely recognized as a bottleneck that critically limits the efficiency of FEEL. Although over-the-air computation can alleviate the excessive cost of radio resources in FEEL model uploading, practical implementations of over-the-air FEEL still suffer from several challenges, including strong straggler issues, large communication overheads, and potential privacy leakage. In this article, we study these challenges in over-the-air FEEL and leverage reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), a key enabler of future wireless systems, to address these challenges. We study the state-of-the-art solutions on RIS-empowered FEEL and explore the promising research opportunities for adopting RIS to enhance FEEL performance.
To realize cooperative computation and communication in a relay mobile edge computing system, we develop a hybrid relay forward protocol, where we seek to balance the execution delay and network energy consumption. The problem is formulated as a nondifferentible optimization problem which is nonconvex with highly coupled constraints. By exploiting the problem structure, we propose a lightweight algorithm based on inexact block coordinate descent method. Our results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits much faster convergence as compared with the popular concave-convex procedure based algorithm, while achieving good performance.
The capacity regions are investigated for two relay broadcast channels (RBCs), where relay links are incorporated into standard two-user broadcast channels to support user cooperation. In the first channel, the Partially Cooperative Relay Broadcast Channel, only one user in the system can act as a relay and transmit to the other user through a relay link. An achievable rate region is derived based on the relay using the decode-and-forward scheme. An outer bound on the capacity region is derived and is shown to be tighter than the cut-set bound. For the special case where the Partially Cooperative RBC is degraded, the achievable rate region is shown to be tight and provides the capacity region. Gaussian Partially Cooperative RBCs and Partially Cooperative RBCs with feedback are further studied. In the second channel model being studied in the paper, the Fully Cooperative Relay Broadcast Channel, both users can act as relay nodes and transmit to each other through relay links. This is a more general model than the Partially Cooperative RBC. All the results for Partially Cooperative RBCs are correspondingly generalized to the Fully Cooperative RBCs. It is further shown that the AWGN Fully Cooperative RBC has a larger achievable rate region than the AWGN Partially Cooperative RBC. The results illustrate that relaying and user cooperation are powerful techniques in improving the capacity of broadcast channels.
Federated edge learning (FEEL) is a widely adopted framework for training an artificial intelligence (AI) model distributively at edge devices to leverage their data while preserving their data privacy. The execution of a power-hungry learning task at energy-constrained devices is a key challenge confronting the implementation of FEEL. To tackle the challenge, we propose the solution of powering devices using wireless power transfer (WPT). To derive guidelines on deploying the resultant wirelessly powered FEEL (WP-FEEL) system, this work aims at the derivation of the tradeoff between the model convergence and the settings of power sources in two scenarios: 1) the transmission power and density of power-beacons (dedicated charging stations) if they are deployed, or otherwise 2) the transmission power of a server (access-point). The development of the proposed analytical framework relates the accuracy of distributed stochastic gradient estimation to the WPT settings, the randomness in both communication and WPT links, and devices computation capacities. Furthermore, the local-computation at devices (i.e., mini-batch size and processor clock frequency) is optimized to efficiently use the harvested energy for gradient estimation. The resultant learning-WPT tradeoffs reveal the simple scaling laws of the model-convergence rate with respect to the transferred energy as well as the devices computational energy efficiencies. The results provide useful guidelines on WPT provisioning to provide a guaranteer on learning performance. They are corroborated by experimental results using a real dataset.
In federated learning (FL), devices contribute to the global training by uploading their local model updates via wireless channels. Due to limited computation and communication resources, device scheduling is crucial to the convergence rate of FL. In this paper, we propose a joint device scheduling and resource allocation policy to maximize the model accuracy within a given total training time budget for latency constrained wireless FL. A lower bound on the reciprocal of the training performance loss, in terms of the number of training rounds and the number of scheduled devices per round, is derived. Based on the bound, the accuracy maximization problem is solved by decoupling it into two sub-problems. First, given the scheduled devices, the optimal bandwidth allocation suggests allocating more bandwidth to the devices with worse channel conditions or weaker computation capabilities. Then, a greedy device scheduling algorithm is introduced, which in each step selects the device consuming the least updating time obtained by the optimal bandwidth allocation, until the lower bound begins to increase, meaning that scheduling more devices will degrade the model accuracy. Experiments show that the proposed policy outperforms state-of-the-art scheduling policies under extensive settings of data distributions and cell radius.