Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are capable of serving as flying base stations (BSs) for supporting data collection, artificial intelligence (AI) model training, and wireless communications. However, due to the privacy concerns of devices and limited computation or communication resource of UAVs, it is impractical to send raw data of devices to UAV servers for model training. Moreover, due to the dynamic channel condition and heterogeneous computing capacity of devices in UAV-enabled networks, the reliability and efficiency of data sharing require to be further improved. In this paper, we develop an asynchronous federated learning (AFL) framework for multi-UAV-enabled networks, which can provide asynchronous distributed computing by enabling model training locally without transmitting raw sensitive data to UAV servers. The device selection strategy is also introduced into the AFL framework to keep the low-quality devices from affecting the learning efficiency and accuracy. Moreover, we propose an asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) based joint device selection, UAVs placement, and resource management algorithm to enhance the federated convergence speed and accuracy. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed framework and algorithm achieve higher learning accuracy and faster federated execution time compared to other existing solutions.
To prolong the lifetime of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the UAVs need to fulfill their missions in the shortest possible time. In addition to this requirement, in many applications, the UAVs require a reliable internet connection during their flights. In this paper, we minimize the travel time of the UAVs, ensuring that a probabilistic connectivity constraint is satisfied. To solve this problem, we need a global model of the outage probability in the environment. Since the UAVs have different missions and fly over different areas, their collected data carry local information on the net…
With huge amounts of data explosively increasing in the mobile edge, over-the-air federated learning (OA-FL) emerges as a promising technique to reduce communication costs and privacy leak risks. However, when devices in a relatively large area cooperatively train a machine learning model, the attendant straggler issues will significantly reduce the learning performance. In this paper, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assisted OA-FL system, where the UAV acts as a parameter server (PS) to aggregate the local gradients hierarchically for global model updating. Under this UAV-assisted…
This article investigates the energy efficiency issue in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enhanced Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, where a mobile unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is exploited as a flying base station to collect data from ground devices via the NOMA protocol. With the aim of maximizing network energy efficiency, we formulate a joint problem of UAV deployment, device scheduling and resource allocation. First, we formulate the joint device scheduling and spectrum allocation problem as a three-sided matching problem, and propose a novel low-complexity near-optimal algorithm. …
In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted mobile edge computing (MEC) architecture, in which a UAV roaming around the area may serve as a computing server to help user equipment (UEs) compute their tasks or act as a relay for further offloading their computation tasks to the access point (AP). We aim to minimize the weighted sum energy consumption of the UAV and UEs subject to the task constraints, the information-causality constraints, the bandwidth allocation constraints and the UAV's trajectory constraints. The required optimization is nonconvex, and an alternating o…
Qatar University（卡塔尔大学）；Qualcomm Inc（高通公司）；Hamad Bin Khalifa University（哈马德·本·哈利法大学）
The usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in civil and military applications continues to increase due to the numerous advantages that they provide over conventional approaches. Despite the abundance of such advantages, it is imperative to investigate the performance of UAV utilization while considering their design limitations. This paper investigates the deployment of UAV swarms when each UAV carries a machine learning classification task. To avoid data exchange with ground-based processing nodes, a federated learning approach is adopted between a UAV leader and the swarm members to impro…
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工学院暨州立大学）
Due to flexibility, autonomy and low operational cost, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as fixed aerial base stations, are increasingly being used as \textit{relays} to collect time-sensitive information (i.e., status updates) from IoT devices and deliver it to the nearby terrestrial base station (TBS), where the information gets processed. In order to ensure timely delivery of information to the TBS (from all IoT devices), optimal scheduling of time-sensitive information over two hop UAV-relayed IoT networks (i.e., IoT device to the UAV [hop 1], and UAV to the TBS [hop 2]) becomes a critical …
Distributed training of machine learning models directly on satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) is considered. Based on a federated learning (FL) algorithm specifically targeted at the unique challenges of the satellite scenario, we design a scheduler that exploits the predictability of visiting times between ground stations (GS) and satellites to reduce model staleness. Numerical experiments show that this can improve the convergence speed by a factor three.
This paper investigates the control of a massive population of UAVs such as drones. The straightforward method of control of UAVs by considering the interactions among them to make a flock requires a huge inter-UAV communication which is impossible to implement in real-time applications. One method of control is to apply the mean-field game (MFG) framework which substantially reduces communications among the UAVs. However, to realize this framework, powerful processors are required to obtain the control laws at different UAVs. This requirement limits the usage of the MFG framework for real-tim…
Anomaly detection for the Internet of Things (IoT) is a major intelligent service required by many fields, including intrusion detection, device-activity analysis, and security supervision. However, the heterogeneous distribution of data and resource-constrained end nodes present challenges for existing anomaly detection models. Due to the advantages of flexible deployment and multi-dimensional resources, high altitude platform stations (HAPSs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are important components of vertical heterogeneous networks (VHetNets), have significant potential for sensi…
To handle the data explosion in the era of internet of things (IoT), it is of interest to investigate the decentralized network, with the aim at relaxing the burden to central server along with keeping data privacy. In this work, we develop a fully decentralized federated learning (FL) framework with an inexact stochastic parallel random walk alternating direction method of multipliers (ISPW-ADMM). Performing more communication efficient and enhanced privacy preservation compared with the current state-of-the-art, the proposed ISPW-ADMM can be partially immune to the impacts from time-varying …
Due to the advanced capabilities of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) components such as vehicles, Roadside Units (RSUs) and smart devices as well as the increasing amount of data generated, Federated Learning (FL) becomes a promising tool given that it enables privacy-preserving machine learning that can be implemented in the IoV. However, the performance of the FL suffers from the failure of communication links and missing nodes, especially when continuous exchanges of model parameters are required. Therefore, we propose the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as wireless relays to facilitat…
Coupled with the rise of Deep Learning, the wealth of data and enhanced computation capabilities of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) components enable effective Artificial Intelligence (AI) based models to be built. Beyond ground data sources, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) based service providers for data collection and AI model training, i.e., Drones-as-a-Service, is increasingly popular in recent years. However, the stringent regulations governing data privacy potentially impedes data sharing across independently owned UAVs. To this end, we propose the adoption of a Federated Learning (FL) based…
In this work, we adopt the emerging technology of mobile edge computing (MEC) in the Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for communication-computing systems, to optimize the age of information (AoI) in the network. We assume that tasks are processed jointly on UAVs and BS to enhance edge performance with limited connectivity and computing. Using UAVs and BS jointly with MEC can reduce AoI on the network. To maintain the freshness of the tasks, we formulate the AoI minimization in two-hop communication framework, the first hop at the UAVs and the second hop at the BS. To approach the challenge, we …
Utah State University（犹他州立大学）；University of Wisconsin-Whitewater（威斯康星大学怀特沃特分校）
A new machine learning (ML) technique termed as federated learning (FL) aims to preserve data at the edge devices and to only exchange ML model parameters in the learning process. FL not only reduces the communication needs but also helps to protect the local privacy. Although FL has these advantages, it can still experience large communication latency when there are massive edge devices connected to the central parameter server (PS) and/or millions of model parameters involved in the learning process. Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is capable of computing while transmitting data by allowi…
We describe the orchestration of a decentralized swarm of rotary-wing UAV-relays, augmenting the coverage and service capabilities of a terrestrial base station. Our goal is to minimize the time-average service latencies involved in handling transmission requests from ground users under Poisson arrivals, subject to an average UAV power constraint. Equipped with rate adaptation to efficiently leverage air-to-ground channel stochastics, we first derive the optimal control policy for a single relay via a semi-Markov decision process formulation, with competitive swarm optimization for UAV traject…
To enable communication-efficient federated learning (FL), this paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled FL system, where the UAV coordinates distributed ground devices for a shared model training. Specifically, by exploiting the UAV's high altitude and mobility, the UAV can proactively establish short-distance line-of-sight links with devices and prevent any device from being a communication straggler. Thus, the model aggregation process can be accelerated while the cumulative model loss caused by device scheduling can be reduced, resulting in a decreased completion time. We fir…
In this paper, we propose a device scheduling scheme for differentially private over-the-air federated learning (DP-OTA-FL) systems, referred to as S-DPOTAFL, where the privacy of the participants is guaranteed by channel noise. In S-DPOTAFL, the gradients are aligned by the alignment coefficient and aggregated via over-the-air computation (AirComp). The scheme schedules the devices with better channel conditions in the training to avoid the problem that the alignment coefficient is limited by the device with the worst channel condition in the system. We conduct the privacy and convergence ana…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；University of Colorado Colorado Springs（科罗拉多大学科罗拉多斯普林斯分校）；Ericsson Research（爱立信研究院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Oulu（奥卢大学）
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms must exploit machine learning (ML) in order to execute various tasks ranging from coordinated trajectory planning to cooperative target recognition. However, due to the lack of continuous connections between the UAV swarm and ground base stations (BSs), using centralized ML will be challenging, particularly when dealing with a large volume of data. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed to implement distributed federated learning (FL) algorithms within a UAV swarm that consists of a leading UAV and several following UAVs. Each following UAV trains a l…
This paper investigates user scheduling and trajectory optimization for a network supported by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The IRS is powered via the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique. The IRS boosts users' uplink signals to improve the network's longevity and energy efficiency. It simultaneously harvests energy with a non-linear energy harvesting circuit and reflects the incident signals by controlling its reflection coefficients and phase shifts. The trajectory of the UAV impacts the efficiency of t…
In unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) applications, the UAV's limited energy supply and storage have triggered the development of intelligent energy-conserving scheduling solutions. In this paper, we investigate energy minimization for UAV-aided communication networks by jointly optimizing data-transmission scheduling and UAV hovering time. The formulated problem is combinatorial and non-convex with bilinear constraints. To tackle the problem, firstly, we provide an optimal relax-and-approximate solution and develop a near-optimal algorithm. Both the proposed solutions are served as offline perform…
Federated learning (FL) is recognized as a key enabling technology to support distributed artificial intelligence (AI) services in future 6G. By supporting decentralized data training and collaborative model training among devices, FL inherently tames privacy leakage and reduces transmission costs. Whereas, the performance of the wireless FL is typically restricted by the communication latency. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technique is one promising solution to build up a communication-efficient edge FL system with limited radio resources. In this paper, we propose a novel joint devic…
Heilongjiang University（黑龙江大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Georgia Southern University（佐治亚南方大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；Alibaba-NTU Joint Research Institute（阿里巴巴-南洋理工大学联合研究院）；Joint NTU-UBC Research Centre of Excellence in Active Living for the Elderly（南洋理工大学-不列颠哥伦比亚大学积极乐龄卓越联合研究中心）
Due to air quality significantly affects human health, it is becoming increasingly important to accurately and timely predict the Air Quality Index (AQI). To this end, this paper proposes a new federated learning-based aerial-ground air quality sensing framework for fine-grained 3D air quality monitoring and forecasting. Specifically, in the air, this framework leverages a light-weight Dense-MobileNet model to achieve energy-efficient end-to-end learning from haze features of haze images taken by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for predicting AQI scale distribution. Furthermore, the Federated …
Latency Minimization for UAV-Enabled Federated Learning: Trajectory Design and Resource Allocation
Shenzhen Future Network of Intelligence Institute (FNii-Shenzhen)（深圳未来智能网络研究院）；School of Science and Engineering (SSE)（科学与工程学院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT)（深圳先进技术研究院）；Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（中国科学院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；Central South University（中南大学）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳理工大学）
Integrated Sensing, Computation, and Communication for UAV-assisted Federated Edge Learning
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Southeast University（东南大学）；City University of Hong Kong（香港城市大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning model that preserves data privacy in the training process. Specifically, FL brings the model directly to the user equipments (UEs) for local training, where an edge server periodically collects the trained parameters to produce an improved model and sends it back to the UEs. However, since communication usually occurs through a limited spectrum, only a portion of the UEs can update their parameters upon each global aggregation. As such, new scheduling algorithms have to be engineered to facilitate the full implementation of FL. In this paper, based…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are developing rapidly owing to flexible deployment and access services as air base stations. However, the channel errors of low-altitude communication links formed by mobile deployment of UAVs cannot be ignored. And the energy efficiency of the UAVs communication with imperfect channel state information (CSI) hasnt been well studied yet. Therefore, we focus on system performance optimization in non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) UAV network considering imperfect CSI between the UAV and users. A suboptimal resource allocation scheme including user scheduling …
DL-DRL: A double-level deep reinforcement learning approach for large-scale task scheduling of multi-UAV
Central South University（中南大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院）
University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
In this paper, we investigate a computing task scheduling problem in space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) for delay-oriented Internet of Things (IoT) services. In the considered scenario, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects computing tasks from IoT devices and then makes online offloading decisions, in which the tasks can be processed at the UAV or offloaded to the nearby base station or the remote satellite. Our objective is to design a task scheduling policy that minimizes offloading and computing delay of all tasks given the UAV energy capacity constraint. To this end, we first…
Federated Learning (FL) is a newly emerged decentralized machine learning (ML) framework that combines on-device local training with server-based model synchronization to train a centralized ML model over distributed nodes. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous FL framework with periodic aggregation to eliminate the straggler issue in FL systems. For the proposed model, we investigate several device scheduling and update aggregation policies and compare their performances when the devices have heterogeneous computation capabilities and training data distributions. From the simulation resul…
This work considers unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks for collecting data covertly from ground users. The full-duplex UAV intends to gather critical information from a scheduled user (SU) through wireless communication and generate artificial noise (AN) with random transmit power in order to ensure a negligible probability of the SU's transmission being detected by the unscheduled users (USUs). To enhance the system performance, we jointly design the UAV's trajectory and its maximum AN transmit power together with the user scheduling strategy subject to practical constraints, e.g., a cove…
Hitachi (China) Research & Development Cooperation（日立（中国）研发有限公司）
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 d…
Owing to the controlling flexibility and cost-effectiveness, fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to serve as flying base stations (BSs) in the air-ground integrated network. By exploiting the mobility of UAVs, controllable coverage can be provided for mobile group users (MGUs) under challenging scenarios or even somewhere without communication infrastructure. However, in such dual mobility scenario where the UAV and MGUs are all moving, both the non-hovering feature of the fixed-wing UAV and the movement of MGUs will exacerbate the dynamic changes of user scheduling, which …
This paper investigates a full-duplex orthogonal-frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) based multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-enabled wireless-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. In this paper, a swarm of UAVs is first deployed in three dimensions (3D) to simultaneously charge all devices, i.e., a downlink (DL) charging period, and then flies to new locations within this area to collect information from scheduled devices in several epochs via OFDMA due to potential limited number of channels available in Narrow Band IoT, i.e., an uplink (UL) communication period. To maximiz…
Utah State University（犹他州立大学）；University of Wisconsin-Whitewater（威斯康星大学怀特沃特分校）
Federated learning (FL) is a highly pursued machine learning technique that can train a model centrally while keeping data distributed. Distributed computation makes FL attractive for bandwidth limited applications especially in wireless communications. There can be a large number of distributed edge devices connected to a central parameter server (PS) and iteratively download/upload data from/to the PS. Due to the limited bandwidth, only a subset of connected devices can be scheduled in each round. There are usually millions of parameters in the state-of-art machine learning models such as de…
In this paper, we jointly design the power control and position dispatch for Multi-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled communication in device-to-device (D2D) networks. Our objective is to maximize the total transmission rate of downlink users (DUs). Meanwhile, the quality of service (QoS) of all D2D users must be satisfied. We comprehensively considered the interference among D2D communications and downlink transmissions. The original problem is strongly non-convex, which requires high computational complexity for traditional optimization methods. And to make matters worse, the results are …
Motivated by the increasing computational capacity of wireless user equipments (UEs), e.g., smart phones, tablets, or vehicles, as well as the increasing concerns about sharing private data, a new machine learning model has emerged, namely federated learning (FL), that allows a decoupling of data acquisition and computation at the central unit. Unlike centralized learning taking place in a data center, FL usually operates in a wireless edge network where the communication medium is resource-constrained and unreliable. Due to limited bandwidth, only a portion of UEs can be scheduled for updates…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely employed to enhance the end-to-end performance of wireless communications since the links between UAVs and terrestrial nodes are line-of-sight (LoS) with high probability. However, the broadcast characteristics of signal propagation in LoS links make it vulnerable to being wiretapped by malicious eavesdroppers, which poses a considerable challenge to the security of wireless communications. This paper investigates the security of aerial cognitive radio networks (CRNs). An airborne base station transmits confidential messages to secondary users u…
Feature-Based Semantics-Aware Scheduling for Energy-Harvesting Federated Learning
Department of Computer and Information Science（计算机与信息科学系）；Linköping University（林奈技术大学）；Department of Information Engineering（信息工程系）；University of Brescia（布雷西亚大学）；ZJU-UIUC Institute（浙大-伊利诺伊大学联合研究所）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；China Academy of Information and Communications Technology（中国信息通信研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
The popular federated edge learning (FEEL) framework allows privacy-preserving collaborative model training via frequent learning-updates exchange between edge devices and server. Due to the constrained bandwidth, only a subset of devices can upload their updates at each communication round. This has led to an active research area in FEEL studying the optimal device scheduling policy for minimizing communication time. However, owing to the difficulty in quantifying the exact communication time, prior work in this area can only tackle the problem partially by considering either the communicatio…
