Gradient Statistics Aware Power Control for Over-the-Air Federated Learning in Fading Channels

To enable communication-efficient federated learning, fast model aggregation can be designed using over-the-air computation (AirComp). In order to implement a reliable and high-performance AirComp over fading channels, power control at edge devices is crucial. Existing works assume that the signal to be aggregated from each device is identically distributed, and normalized with zero mean and unit variance. This assumption, however, does not hold for gradient aggregation in machine learning because gradient statistics are unknown for each device. In this paper, we study the optimal power control problem for efficient over-the-air FL by taking gradient statistics into account. Our goal is to minimize the model aggregation error measured by mean square error (MSE) by jointly optimizing the transmit power of each device and the denoising factor at the edge server. We first derive the optimal solution in closed form where the gradient first-order and second-order statistics are known. We then propose a method to estimate the gradient statistics based on the historical aggregated gradients and then dynamically adjust the transmit power on devices over each training iteration. Experiment results show that our proposed power control is better than existing full power transmission and threshold-based power control in both model accuracy and convergence rate.