Noise Resilient Over-The-Air Federated Learning In Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Abstract

In 6G wireless networks, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven applications demand the adoption of Federated Learning (FL) to enable efficient and privacy-preserving model training across distributed devices. Over-The-Air Federated Learning (OTA-FL) exploits the superposition property of multiple access channels, allowing edge users in 6G networks to efficiently share spectral resources and perform low-latency global model aggregation. However, these advantages come with challenges, as traditional OTA-FL techniques suffer due to the joint effects of Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) at the server, fading, and both data and system heterogeneity at the participating edge devices. In this work, we propose the novel Noise Resilient Over-the-Air Federated Learning (NoROTA-FL) framework to jointly tackle these challenges in federated wireless networks. In NoROTA-FL, the local optimization problems find controlled inexact solutions, which manifests as an additional proximal constraint at the clients. This approach provides robustness against straggler-induced partial work, heterogeneity, noise, and fading. From a theoretical perspective, we leverage the zeroth- and first-order inexactness and establish convergence guarantees for non-convex optimization problems in the presence of heterogeneous data and varying system capabilities. Experimentally, we validate NoROTA-FL on real-world datasets, including FEMNIST, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100, demonstrating its robustness in noisy and heterogeneous environments. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines such as COTAF and FedProx, NoROTA-FL achieves significantly more stable convergence and higher accuracy, particularly in the presence of stragglers.