Blind Federated Learning via Over-the-Air q-QAM

In this work, we investigate federated edge learning over a fading multiple access channel. To alleviate the communication burden between the edge devices and the access point, we introduce a pioneering digital over-the-air computation strategy employing q-ary quadrature amplitude modulation, culminating in a low latency communication scheme. Indeed, we propose a new federated edge learning framework in which edge devices use digital modulation for over-the-air uplink transmission to the edge server while they have no access to the channel state information. Furthermore, we incorporate multiple antennas at the edge server to overcome the fading inherent in wireless communication. We analyze the number of antennas required to mitigate the fading impact effectively. We prove a non-asymptotic upper bound for the mean squared error for the proposed federated learning with digital over-the-air uplink transmissions under both noisy and fading conditions. Leveraging the derived upper bound, we characterize the convergence rate of the learning process of a non-convex loss function in terms of the mean square error of gradients due to the fading channel. Furthermore, we substantiate the theoretical assurances through numerical experiments concerning mean square error and the convergence efficacy of the digital federated edge learning framework. Notably, the results demonstrate that augmenting the number of antennas at the edge server and adopting higher-order modulations improve the model accuracy up to 60%. © 2024 The Authors.