On Addressing Heterogeneity in Federated Learning for Autonomous Vehicles Connected to a Drone Orchestrator

In this paper we envision a federated learning (FL) scenario in service of amending the performance of autonomous road vehicles, through a drone traffic monitor (DTM), that also acts as an orchestrator. Expecting non-IID data distribution, we focus on the issue of accelerating the learning of a particular class of critical object (CO), that may harm the nominal operation of an autonomous vehicle. This can be done through proper allocation of the wireless resources for addressing learner and data heterogeneity. Thus, we propose a reactive method for the allocation of wireless resources, that happens dynamically each FL round, and is based on each learner’s contribution to the general model. In addition to this, we explore the use of static methods that remain constant across all rounds. Since we expect partial work from each learner, we use the FedProx FL algorithm, in the task of computer vision. For testing, we construct a non-IID data distribution of the MNIST and FMNIST datasets among four types of learners, in scenarios that represent the quickly changing environment. The results show that proactive measures are effective and versatile at improving system accuracy, and quickly learning the CO class when underrepresented in the network. Furthermore, the experiments show a tradeoff between FedProx intensity and resource allocation efforts. Nonetheless, a well adjusted FedProx local optimizer allows for an even better overall accuracy, particularly when using deeper neural network (NN) implementations.