UAV-Assisted Online Machine Learning Over Multi-Tiered Networks: A Hierarchical Nested Personalized Federated Learning Approach

Su Wang, Seyyedali Hosseinalipour, Maria Gorlatova, Christopher G. Brinton, Mung Chiang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

25 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate training machine learning (ML) models across a set of geo-distributed, resource-constrained clusters of devices through unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) swarms. The presence of time-varying data heterogeneity and computational resource inadequacy among device clusters motivate four key parts of our methodology: (i) stratified UAV swarms of leader, worker, and coordinator UAVs, (ii) hierarchical nested personalized federated learning (HN-PFL), a distributed ML framework for personalized model training across the worker-leader-core network hierarchy, (iii) cooperative UAV resource pooling to address computational inadequacy of devices by conducting model training among the UAV swarms, and (iv) model/concept drift to model time-varying data distributions. In doing so, we consider both micro (i.e., UAV-level) and macro (i.e., swarm-level) system design. At the micro-level, we propose network-aware HN-PFL, where we distributively orchestrate UAVs inside swarms to optimize energy consumption and ML model performance with performance guarantees. At the macro-level, we focus on swarm trajectory and learning duration design, which we formulate as a sequential decision making problem tackled via deep reinforcement learning. Our simulations demonstrate the improvements achieved by our methodology in terms of ML performance, network resource savings, and swarm trajectory efficiency.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1847-1865
Number of pages19
JournalIEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management
Volume20
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 1 2023
Externally publishedYes

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Keywords

  • UAVs
  • distributed model training
  • model drift
  • network optimization
  • personalized federated learning

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'UAV-Assisted Online Machine Learning Over Multi-Tiered Networks: A Hierarchical Nested Personalized Federated Learning Approach'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this