FedBA: Non-IID Federated Learning Framework in
UAV Networks
Pei Li
School of Data Science and Technology
Heilongjiang University
Harbin, China
2212623@s.hlju.edu.cn
Zhijun Liu
School of Data Science and Technology
Heilongjiang University
Harbin, China
2222708@s.hlju.edu.cn
Luyi Chang
School of Data Science and Technology
Heilongjiang University
Harbin, China
2202518@s.hlju.edu.cn
Jialiang Peng
School of Data Science and Technology
Heilongjiang University
Harbin, China
jialiangpeng@hlju.edu.cn
Yi Wu*
School of Data Science and Technology
Heilongjiang University
Harbin, China
1995050@hlju.edu.cn
Abstract—Advances in artificial intelligence technology and the
popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices have brought
great convenience to people’s lives and significantly improved pro-
ductivity. As a new type of Internet of Things device, Unmanned
Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have broad development prospects and
have become a hot research field. However, due to privacy
concerns and the limited communication resources of UAVs, it is
impractical for UAV devices to transmit their raw data via the
air link. Compared with centralized machine learning, Federated
Learning (FL) necessitates the exchange of gradient instead of
local data among participating clients and servers, effectively
protecting user privacy and reducing the communication cost
of participating devices, which is especially suitable for UAV
networks. Nevertheless, there are significant differences in the
images captured by different types of drones carrying cameras
to different areas (i.e., the problem of statistical heterogeneity),
which is still challenging for training FL models. To this end, we
propose an aggregation rule based on the distance between local
and global models, named FedBA, to alleviate the problem of
data heterogeneity in UAV-assisted FL. Results from experiments
demonstrate that, on three real-world data sets (i.e., CIFAR-100,
MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST), our proposed approach performs
noticeably better than the conventional FL algorithm.
Index Terms—federated learning, statistical heterogeneity, un-
manned aerial vehicle, aerial computing
I. INTRODUCTION
Due to the rapid development of network and commu-
nication technologies in recent years, drones have shown
the great commercial value and are widely used in traffic
monitoring, site management, aerial tourism photography and
commercial performances [1]. Especially with the maturity and
perfection of 5G technology and the continuous development
of 6G technology, the computing speed as well as data
The Heilongjiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant
No. LH2020F044), the 2019-“Chunhui Plan” Cooperative Scientific Research
Project of the Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. HLJ2019015), and
the Fundamental Research Funds for Heilongjiang University of China (Grant
No. 2020-KYYWF-1014) have all contributed to the funding of this work.
*Yi Wu is the corresponding author.
transmission rate has been greatly improved [2]. Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is gradually being used as an aerial
service device with its excellent mobility, high computing
power, and high perception capability [3]. Drones are uniquely
suited for remote and dangerous areas (e.g., wildlife photo
collection, atmospheric cloud weather prediction) as well as
for scenarios that require extreme real-time performance (e.g.,
traffic management, mountain power maintenance, disaster
prediction). In addition, the UAV cluster, as an aerial edge
device, can collect data through its sensors and then transmit
the data to the central server for processing and modeling [4].
However, this process can cause privacy leakage of users and
increase communication costs [5].
The two main reasons for the above problems are as follows.
First, when users upload their private data to a third-party
central server if the third-party central server is attacked by
hackers or the third-party central server is untrustworthy, it will
cause the risk of user private data leakage. Second, traditional
centralized machine learning requires that a large amount of
data be uploaded to a third-party server for computing. Due
to the limited communication resources of UAVs, they cannot
afford high communication costs [6].
In response to these challenges, Federated Learning (FL)
[7] is gradually becoming the main focus of popular research.
By merely uploading model parameters, federated learning
addresses the issue of communication costs and lowers the
danger of data leaking. Nevertheless, when multiple UAVs
work jointly, the difference in the monitoring area of each
UAV causes heterogeneity in the collected sensing data. This
eventually causes the local device’s ability to recognize data
and the precision of the global model to decline [8] [9]. To
this end, we propose a brand-new calculation method for an
aggregate based on the distance between training models to
palliate the non-IID problem caused by local data. The system
overview of this paper is shown in Fig. 1. Consequently, the
following are the contributions to this paper:
arXiv:2210.04699v2 [cs.LG] 27 Dec 2022