Latency Minimization in Covert Communication-Enabled Federated Learning Network

• Published in: IEEE transactions on vehicular technology Vol. 70; no. 12; pp. 13447 - 13452
• Main Authors: Van, Nguyen Thi Thanh, Luong, Nguyen Cong, Nguyen, Huy T., Shaohan, Feng, Niyato, Dusit, Kim, Dong In
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-12-2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Communication system security; Computational modeling; Covert communication; Electronic devices; Federated learning; Jammers; Jamming; latency minimization; Machine learning; Mobile handsets; Network latency; Optimization; Performance evaluation; secure model update; Security
• ISSN: 0018-9545; 1939-9359
• DOI: 10.1109/TVT.2021.3121004

Federated Learning (FL) as a promising technique is able to address the privacy issues in machine learning. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless channel, one of the key challenges of FL is its vulnerability to wireless security threats. Thus, in this paper, we consider the model update security in FL. In particular, we propose to adopt a covert communication technique with which a friendly jammer transmits jamming signals to prevent a warden from detecting local model update transmissions of mobile devices in FL. The use of jamming signals reduces the transmission rate of the devices. Thus, we formulate an optimization problem that jointly determines the jamming power, local model transmission power, and local training accuracy to minimize the FL latency, given a security performance requirement. The problem is non-convex, and we propose an alternating descent algorithm to solve it. Extensive simulations are conducted and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and network performance improvement of the proposed algorithm.