Private Aggregation in Wireless Federated Learning with Heterogeneous Clusters

Federated learning collaboratively trains a neural network on privately owned data held by several participating clients. The gradient descent algorithm, a well-known and popular iterative optimization procedure, is run to train the neural network. Every client uses its local data to compute partial gradients and sends it to the federator which aggregates the results. Privacy of the clients’ data is a major concern. In fact, observing the partial gradients can be enough to reveal the clients’ data. Private aggregation schemes have been investigated to tackle the privacy problem in federated learning where all the users are connected to each other and to the federator. In this paper, we consider a wireless system architecture where clients are only connected to the federator via base stations. We derive fundamental limits on the communication cost when information-theoretic privacy is required, and introduce and analyze a private aggregation scheme tailored for this setting.