Hierarchical Over-the-Air Federated Learning with Awareness of Interference and Data Heterogeneity

Abstract: When implementing hierarchical federated learning over wireless networks, scalability assurance and the ability to handle both interference and device data heterogeneity are crucial. This work introduces a learning method designed to address these challenges, along with a scalable transmission scheme that efficiently uses a single wireless resource through over-the-air computation. To provide resistance against data heterogeneity, we employ gradient aggregations. Meanwhile, the impact of interference is minimized through optimized receiver normalizing factors. For this, we model a multi-cluster wireless network using stochastic geometry, and characterize the mean squared error of the aggregation estimations as a function of the network parameters. We show that despite the interference and the data heterogeneity, the proposed scheme achieves high learning accuracy and can significantly outperform the conventional hierarchical algorithm.