Federated Cooperation and Augmentation for Power Allocation in Decentralized Wireless Networks

Emerging mobile edge techniques and applications such as Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR), Internet of Things (IoT), and vehicle networking, result in an explosive growth of power and computing resource consumptions. In the meantime, the volume of data generated at the edge networks is also increasing rapidly. Under this circumstance, building energy-efficient and privacy-protected communications is imperative for 5G and beyond wireless communication systems. The recent emerging distributed learning methods such as federated learning (FL) perform well in improving resource efficiency while protecting user privacy with low communication overhead. Specifically, FL enables edge devices to learn a shared network model by aggregating local updates while keeping all the training processes on local devices. This paper investigates distributed power allocation for edge users in decentralized wireless networks with aim to maximize energy/spectrum efficiency while preventing privacy leakage based on a FL framework. Due to the dynamics and complexity of wireless networks, we adopt an on-line Actor-Critic (AC) architecture as the local training model, and FL performs cooperation for edge users by sharing the gradients and weightages generated in the Actor network. Moreover, in order to resolve the over-fitting problem caused by data leakages in Non-independent and identically distributed (Non-i.i.d) data environment, we propose a federated augmentation mechanism with Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGANs) algorithm for data augmentation. Federated augmentation empowers each device to replenish the data buffer using a generative model of WGANs until accomplishing an i.i.d training dataset, which significantly reduces the communication overhead in distributed learning compared to direct data sample exchange method. Numerical results reveal that the proposed federated learning based cooperation and augmentation (FL-CA) algorithm possesses a good convergence property, high robustness and achieves better accuracy of power allocation strategy than other three benchmark algorithms.