Federated learning over wireless fading channels
File(s)AG_TWC20.pdf (1.76 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Mohammadi Amiri, Mohammad
Gunduz, Deniz
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
We study federated machine learning at the wirelessnetwork edge, where limited power wireless devices, each withits own dataset, build a joint model with the help of a remoteparameter server (PS). We consider a bandwidth-limited fadingmultiple access channel (MAC) from the wireless devices to thePS, and propose various techniques to implement distributedstochastic gradient descent (DSGD) over this shared noisywireless channel. We first propose a digital DSGD (D-DSGD)scheme, in which one device is selected opportunistically fortransmission at each iteration based on the channel conditions;the scheduled device quantizes its gradient estimate to a finitenumber of bits imposed by the channel condition, and transmitsthese bits to the PS in a reliable manner. Next, motivated bythe additive nature of the wireless MAC, we propose a novelanalog communication scheme, referred to as thecompressedanalogDSGD (CA-DSGD), where the devices first sparsifytheir gradient estimates while accumulating error from previousiterations, and project the resultant sparse vector into a low-dimensional vector for bandwidth reduction. We also design apower allocation scheme to align the received gradient vectorsat the PS in an efficient manner. Numerical results show thatD-DSGD outperforms other digital approaches in the literature;however, in general the proposed CA-DSGD algorithm convergesfaster than the D-DSGD scheme, and reaches a higher level ofaccuracy. We have observed that the gap between the analogand digital schemes increases when the datasets of devices arenot independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.). Furthermore,the performance of the CA-DSGD scheme is shown to be robustagainst imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the devices.Overall these results show clear advantages for the proposedanalog over-the-air DSGD scheme, which suggests that learningand communication algorithms should be designed jointly toachieve the best end-to-end performance in machine learningapplications at the wireless edge.
Date Issued
2020-05-01
Date Acceptance
2020-02-09
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 2020, 19 (5), pp.3546-3557
ISSN
1536-1276
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Start Page
3546
End Page
3557
Journal / Book Title
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Volume
19
Issue
5
Copyright Statement
© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Sponsor
Commission of the European Communities
Grant Number
677854
Subjects
Networking & Telecommunications
0805 Distributed Computing
0906 Electrical and Electronic Engineering
1005 Communications Technologies
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2020-02-26