Energy Harvesting Aware Client Selection for Over-the-Air Federated Learning

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) has been widely regarded as a promising distributed machine learning technology that utilizes on-device computation while protecting clients' data privacy. To adapt FL to wireless networks, the over-the-air (OTA) computation, which employs the superposition nature of wireless waveforms, can prevent excessive consumption of the communication resources. However, energy harvesting technology can overcome the energy limitation of clients to realize durable computation. Despite the existing works devoted to OTA FL from various aspects, they mostly neglect jointly performing client selection and energy management for energy harvesting devices. In this paper, we investigate the combined problem of client selection and energy management for OTA FL and formulate it as a nonlinear integer programming (NIP) problem to minimize the optimality gap. To solve the NIP problem, we propose a client selection scheme that jointly considers channel state information, residual battery capacities, and dataset size. Our simulation results show that the proposed solution outperforms other comparison schemes within various parameter settings.