Mobility-Aware Decentralized Federated Learning for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

Abstract

The underwater Internet of Things (UIoT) is crucial in developing marine resources. However, due to the low data rate of underwater channels, it is difficult to have a central server to process data from numerous devices as using terrestrial communications. Therefore, decentralized federated learning (DFL) with communication-efficient modifications is a promising alternative to empower UIoT with artificial intelligence and collaborative training. However, existing DFL strategies rely on a carefully designed small aggregation weight when aggregating parameters from neighbor nodes to mitigate the compression error, resulting in a slow convergence rate. In addition, the effect of data compression under time-varying topologies is not considered in current DFL algorithms. In response to these problems, this work studies a DFL framework with underwater acoustic channel and time-varying topology. Firstly, considering the low data rate and dynamics of the acoustic channel, we propose a practical scheme for adaptive compression and device connectivity. Moreover, we combine data compression and the error-compensation technique with time-varying topology and propose a DFL algorithm with aggregation weights decaying over time to achieve fast convergence under non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data. We derive a convergence bound for the proposed algorithm with respect to compression and time-varying topology and demonstrate that it achieves the same asymptotic convergence rate as centralized FL with perfect communication. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits higher accuracy and faster convergence rate in underwater environments compared with DFL algorithms without decaying aggregation weights and centralized FL schemes.