Energy-Efficient Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Pinching Antenna Systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the use of pinching antenna systems (PASSs) to significantly reduce energy consumption in over-the-air federated learning by bypassing wireless channel effects with waveguide technology.

Contribution

It introduces a low-complexity algorithm for PASS parameter tuning and device scheduling, demonstrating energy savings over traditional MIMO servers in federated learning.

Findings

Energy consumption is drastically reduced with PASSs compared to MIMO servers.

A single-waveguide PASS can effectively support federated learning in moderate areas.

Proposed algorithm optimizes PASS parameters and device scheduling for minimal energy use.

Abstract

Pinching antennas systems (PASSs) have recently been proposed as a novel flexible-antenna technology. These systems are implemented by attaching low-cost pinching elements to dielectric waveguides. As the direct link is bypassed through waveguides, PASSs can effectively compensate large-scale effects of the wireless channel. This work explores the potential gains of employing PASSs for over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL). For a PASS-assisted server, we develop a low-complexity algorithmic approach, which jointly tunes the PASS parameters and schedules the mobile devices for minimal energy consumption in OTA-FL. We study the efficiency of the proposed design and compare it against the conventional OTA-FL setting with MIMO server. Numerical experiments demonstrate that using a single-waveguide PASS at the server within a moderately sized area, the required energy for model aggregation is drastically reduced as compared to the case with fully-digital MIMO server. This introduces PASS as a potential technology for energy-efficient distributed learning in next generations of wireless systems.