HawkRover: An Autonomous mmWave Vehicular Communication Testbed with Multi-sensor Fusion and Deep Learning

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have become a transformative technology that can change our daily life. Currently, millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands are identified as the promising CAV connectivity solution. While it can provide high data rate, their realization faces many challenges such as high attenuation during mmWave signal propagation and mobility management. Existing solution has to initiate pilot signal to measure channel information, then apply signal processing to calculate the best narrow beam towards the receiver end to guarantee sufficient signal power. This process takes significant overhead and time, hence not suitable for vehicles. In this study, we propose an autonomous and low-cost testbed to collect extensive co-located mmWave signal and other sensors data such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), cameras, ultrasonic, etc, traditionally for ``automated'', to facilitate mmWave vehicular communications. Intuitively, these sensors can build a 3D map around the vehicle and signal propagation path can be estimated, eliminating iterative the process via pilot signals. This multimodal data fusion, together with AI, is expected to bring significant advances in ``connected'' research.

Physics-informed Generalizable Wireless Channel Modeling with Segmentation and Deep Learning: Fundamentals, Methodologies, and Challenges

Channel modeling is fundamental in advancing wireless systems and has thus attracted considerable research focus. Recent trends have seen a growing reliance on data-driven techniques to facilitate the modeling process and yield accurate channel predictions. In this work, we first provide a concise overview of data-driven channel modeling methods, highlighting their limitations. Subsequently, we introduce the concept and advantages of physics-informed neural network (PINN)-based modeling and a summary of recent contributions in this area. Our findings demonstrate that PINN-based approaches in channel modeling exhibit promising attributes such as generalizability, interpretability, and robustness. We offer a comprehensive architecture for PINN methodology, designed to inform and inspire future model development. A case-study of our recent work on precise indoor channel prediction with semantic segmentation and deep learning is presented. The study concludes by addressing the challenges faced and suggesting potential research directions in this field.

A Lightweight Method for Tackling Unknown Participation Probabilities in Federated Averaging

In federated learning (FL), clients usually have diverse participation probabilities that are unknown a priori, which can significantly harm the performance of FL if not handled properly. Existing works aiming at addressing this problem are usually based on global variance reduction, which requires a substantial amount of additional memory in a multiplicative factor equal to the total number of clients. An important open problem is to find a lightweight method for FL in the presence of clients with unknown participation rates. In this paper, we address this problem by adapting the aggregation weights in federated averaging (FedAvg) based on the participation history of each client. We first show that, with heterogeneous participation probabilities, FedAvg with non-optimal aggregation weights can diverge from the optimal solution of the original FL objective, indicating the need of finding optimal aggregation weights. However, it is difficult to compute the optimal weights when the participation probabilities are unknown. To address this problem, we present a new algorithm called FedAU, which improves FedAvg by adaptively weighting the client updates based on online estimates of the optimal weights without knowing the probabilities of client participation. We provide a theoretical convergence analysis of FedAU using a novel methodology to connect the estimation error and convergence. Our theoretical results reveal important and interesting insights, while showing that FedAU converges to an optimal solution of the original objective and has desirable properties such as linear speedup. Our experimental results also verify the advantage of FedAU over baseline methods.

Federated Learning with Flexible Control

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed model training from local data collected by users. In distributed systems with constrained resources and potentially high dynamics, e.g., mobile edge networks, the efficiency of FL is an important problem. Existing works have separately considered different configurations to make FL more efficient, such as infrequent transmission of model updates, client subsampling, and compression of update vectors. However, an important open problem is how to jointly apply and tune these control knobs in a single FL algorithm, to achieve the best performance by allowing a high degree of freedom in control decisions. In this paper, we address this problem and propose FlexFL - an FL algorithm with multiple options that can be adjusted flexibly. Our FlexFL algorithm allows both arbitrary rates of local computation at clients and arbitrary amounts of communication between clients and the server, making both the computation and communication resource consumption adjustable. We prove a convergence upper bound of this algorithm. Based on this result, we further propose a stochastic optimization formulation and algorithm to determine the control decisions that (approximately) minimize the convergence bound, while conforming to constraints related to resource consumption. The advantage of our approach is also verified using experiments.

A Unified Analysis of Federated Learning with Arbitrary Client Participation

Federated learning (FL) faces challenges of intermittent client availability and computation/communication efficiency. As a result, only a small subset of clients can participate in FL at a given time. It is important to understand how partial client participation affects convergence, but most existing works have either considered idealized participation patterns or obtained results with non-zero optimality error for generic patterns. In this paper, we provide a unified convergence analysis for FL with arbitrary client participation. We first introduce a generalized version of federated averaging (FedAvg) that amplifies parameter updates at an interval of multiple FL rounds. Then, we present a novel analysis that captures the effect of client participation in a single term. By analyzing this term, we obtain convergence upper bounds for a wide range of participation patterns, including both non-stochastic and stochastic cases, which match either the lower bound of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) or the state-of-the-art results in specific settings. We also discuss various insights, recommendations, and experimental results.

SlimFL: Federated Learning with Superposition Coding over Slimmable Neural Networks

Federated learning (FL) is a key enabler for efficient communication and computing leveraging devices' distributed computing capabilities. However, applying FL in practice is challenging due to the local devices' heterogeneous energy, wireless channel conditions, and non-independently and identically distributed (non-IID) data distributions. To cope with these issues, this paper proposes a novel learning framework by integrating FL and width-adjustable slimmable neural networks (SNN). Integrating FL with SNNs is challenging due to time-varing channel conditions and data distributions. In addition, existing multi-width SNN training algorithms are sensitive to the data distributions across devices, which makes SNN ill-suited for FL. Motivated by this, we propose a communication and energy-efficient SNN-based FL (named SlimFL) that jointly utilizes superposition coding (SC) for global model aggregation and superposition training (ST) for updating local models. By applying SC, SlimFL exchanges the superposition of multiple width configurations decoded as many times as possible for a given communication throughput. Leveraging ST, SlimFL aligns the forward propagation of different width configurations while avoiding inter-width interference during backpropagation. We formally prove the convergence of SlimFL. The result reveals that SlimFL is not only communication-efficient but also deals with the non-IID data distributions and poor channel conditions, which is also corroborated by data-intensive simulations.

Communication-Efficient Device Scheduling for Federated Learning Using Stochastic Optimization

Federated learning (FL) is a useful tool in distributed machine learning that utilizes users' local datasets in a privacy-preserving manner. When deploying FL in a constrained wireless environment; however, training models in a time-efficient manner can be a challenging task due to intermittent connectivity of devices, heterogeneous connection quality, and non-i.i.d. data. In this paper, we provide a novel convergence analysis of non-convex loss functions using FL on both i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. datasets with arbitrary device selection probabilities for each round. Then, using the derived convergence bound, we use stochastic optimization to develop a new client selection and power allocation algorithm that minimizes a function of the convergence bound and the average communication time under a transmit power constraint. We find an analytical solution to the minimization problem. One key feature of the algorithm is that knowledge of the channel statistics is not required and only the instantaneous channel state information needs to be known. Using the FEMNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets, we show through simulations that the communication time can be significantly decreased using our algorithm, compared to uniformly random participation.

Communication and Energy Efficient Slimmable Federated Learning via Superposition Coding and Successive Decoding

Mobile devices are indispensable sources of big data. Federated learning (FL) has a great potential in exploiting these private data by exchanging locally trained models instead of their raw data. However, mobile devices are often energy limited and wirelessly connected, and FL cannot cope flexibly with their heterogeneous and time-varying energy capacity and communication throughput, limiting the adoption. Motivated by these issues, we propose a novel energy and communication efficient FL framework, coined SlimFL. To resolve the heterogeneous energy capacity problem, each device in SlimFL runs a width-adjustable slimmable neural network (SNN). To address the heterogeneous communication throughput problem, each full-width (1.0x) SNN model and its half-width ($0.5$x) model are superposition-coded before transmission, and successively decoded after reception as the 0.5x or $1.0$x model depending on the channel quality. Simulation results show that SlimFL can simultaneously train both $0.5$x and $1.0$x models with reasonable accuracy and convergence speed, compared to its vanilla FL counterpart separately training the two models using $2$x more communication resources. Surprisingly, SlimFL achieves even higher accuracy with lower energy footprints than vanilla FL for poor channels and non-IID data distributions, under which vanilla FL converges slowly.

Joint Superposition Coding and Training for Federated Learning over Multi-Width Neural Networks

This paper aims to integrate two synergetic technologies, federated learning (FL) and width-adjustable slimmable neural network (SNN) architectures. FL preserves data privacy by exchanging the locally trained models of mobile devices. By adopting SNNs as local models, FL can flexibly cope with the time-varying energy capacities of mobile devices. Combining FL and SNNs is however non-trivial, particularly under wireless connections with time-varying channel conditions. Furthermore, existing multi-width SNN training algorithms are sensitive to the data distributions across devices, so are ill-suited to FL. Motivated by this, we propose a communication and energy-efficient SNN-based FL (named SlimFL) that jointly utilizes superposition coding (SC) for global model aggregation and superposition training (ST) for updating local models. By applying SC, SlimFL exchanges the superposition of multiple width configurations that are decoded as many as possible for a given communication throughput. Leveraging ST, SlimFL aligns the forward propagation of different width configurations, while avoiding the inter-width interference during backpropagation. We formally prove the convergence of SlimFL. The result reveals that SlimFL is not only communication-efficient but also can counteract non-IID data distributions and poor channel conditions, which is also corroborated by simulations.

A Q-Learning-based Approach for Distributed Beam Scheduling in mmWave Networks

We consider the problem of distributed downlink beam scheduling and power allocation for millimeter-Wave (mmWave) cellular networks where multiple base stations (BSs) belonging to different service operators share the same unlicensed spectrum with no central coordination or cooperation among them. Our goal is to design efficient distributed beam scheduling and power allocation algorithms such that the network-level payoff, defined as the weighted sum of the total throughput and a power penalization term, can be maximized. To this end, we propose a distributed scheduling approach to power allocation and adaptation for efficient interference management over the shared spectrum by modeling each BS as an independent Q-learning agent. As a baseline, we compare the proposed approach to the state-of-the-art non-cooperative game-based approach which was previously developed for the same problem. We conduct extensive experiments under various scenarios to verify the effect of multiple factors on the performance of both approaches. Experiment results show that the proposed approach adapts well to different interference situations by learning from experience and can achieve higher payoff than the game-based approach. The proposed approach can also be integrated into our previously developed Lyapunov stochastic optimization framework for the purpose of network utility maximization with optimality guarantee. As a result, the weights in the payoff function can be automatically and optimally determined by the virtual queue values from the sub-problems derived from the Lyapunov optimization framework.