Performance Analysis of Fluid Antenna-Assisted Over-the-Air Federated Learning Under Spatially Correlated Fading

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how fluid antenna technology can enhance over-the-air federated learning by improving reliability and user participation through dynamic antenna positioning in correlated fading channels.

Contribution

It develops a tractable analytical framework for performance characterization of FA-assisted OTA-FL, including closed-form outage probability and user participation metrics.

Findings

FA-assisted OTA-FL outperforms fixed-antenna schemes in reliability.

Spatial correlation impacts the effectiveness of fluid antennas.

Analytical expressions match numerical simulations, validating the model.

Abstract

Fluid antenna (FA) technology has recently emerged as an effective means of exploiting spatial diversity through position-domain reconfigurability. This paper investigates the integration of FA into over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL) systems with the aim of improving aggregation reliability and user participation under realistic channel conditions. By dynamically selecting antenna positions, FA-equipped users can exploit additional spatial degrees of freedom to realize more favorable channel conditions, thereby increasing the probability of successful contribution to the OTA aggregation process in each communication round. We consider an uplink OTA-FL framework consisting of a single fixed-antenna access point and multiple FA-enabled users operating over spatially correlated fading channels. Unlike existing studies that primarily rely on optimization-based designs or numerical evaluations, we develop a tractable analytical framework that enables a rigorous performance characterization of FA-assisted OTA-FL. In particular, closed-form expressions are derived for the aggregation error outage probability and the expected number of participating users per round. Spatial channel correlation across FA ports is modeled using a copula-based approach, where the Clayton copula is adopted to capture lower-tail dependence relevant to worst-case fading conditions. Numerical results validate the analytical findings and demonstrate that FA-assisted OTA-FL significantly outperforms conventional fixed-antenna schemes in terms of aggregation reliability and participation efficiency, while providing insights under practical system considerations.