Entropy-Driven Stochastic Federated Learning in Non-IID 6G Edge-RAN

Scalable and sustainable AI-driven analytics are necessary to enable large-scale and heterogeneous service deployment in sixth-generation (6G) ultra-dense networks. This implies that the exchange of raw monitoring data should be minimized across the network by bringing the analysis functions closer to the data collection points. While federated learning (FL) is an efficient tool to implement such a decentralized strategy, real networks are generally characterized by time- and space-varying traffic patterns and channel conditions, making thereby the data collected in different points non independent and identically distributed (non-IID), which is challenging for FL. To sidestep this issue, we first introduce a new a priori metric that we call dataset entropy, whose role is to capture the distribution, the quantity of information, the unbalanced structure and the “non-IIDness” of a dataset independently of the models. This a priori entropy is calculated using a multi-dimensional spectral clustering scheme over both the features and the supervised output spaces, and is suitable for classification as well as regression tasks. The FL aggregation operations support system (OSS) server then uses the reported dataset entropies to devise 1) an entropy-based federated averaging scheme, and 2) a stochastic participant selection policy to significantly stabilize the training, minimize the convergence time, and reduce the corresponding computation cost. Numerical results are provided to show the superiority of these novel approaches.