Communication-and-Energy Efficient Over-the-Air Federated Learning

Communication and energy efficiencies are two crucial objectives in the pursuit of edge intelligence in 6G networks, and become increasingly important given the prevalence of large model training. Existing designs typically focus on either communication efficiency or energy efficiency due to the fact that improving one objective generally comes at the expense of the other. Over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL) has recently emerged as a promising approach to enhance both efficiencies through an integrated communication and computation design. Nevertheless, most previous studies on OTA-FL only consider scenarios where the dataset for the entire FL procedure is collected and available prior to training. In real-world applications, devices continuously collect new data in an online manner. This underscores the significance of sample collection through sensing in a practical FL pipeline. We propose to integrate sensing with communication and computation into a joint design to further boost the communication-and-energy efficiencies of OTA-FL. Specifically, we consider a training latency and energy consumption minimization problem with performance guarantees. To this end, we first derive an average training error (ATE) metric to quantify convergence performance. Then, a joint sensing, communication and computation resource allocation strategy is developed based on a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm that nests convex optimization with a deep Q-network. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate our theoretical analysis, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design for communication-and-energy efficient FL.