Grant: Alliance Grants

Mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, have gained immense popularity for social media usage, online shopping, smart banking, reading news articles and other similar pursuits. The enormous amount of data that is being generated from this widespread usage of mobile devices, is highly valuable, as it can provide insights into consumer behaviour, preferences, and patterns. Organizations use this data to improve their marketing and advertising strategies, enhance the user experience, and develop more intelligent products and services. In order to extract insights and harness the value of the generated data, centralized machine learning (ML) is commonly employed through cloud-based services in which an entire raw data is transmitted to the central server. Nevertheless, the unprecedented growing number of smart mobile devices and increasingly stringent government regulations regarding the handling of personal information render centralized ML impracticable. With the goal of harnessing the power of ML over wireless networks, Federated Learning (FL) has recently emerged as a scalable and trustworthy solution. Despite its promise, the limited resources of wireless edge networks and unfavourable fading characteristics of wireless channels hinder the scalability and trustworthiness of FL. Hence, this project aims to initiate collaboration with renowned international academic researchers to accomplish the following two outcomes: (i) Develop new wireless multiple access schemes that not only enhance security of the learning process, but also enable faster convergence for training and more accurate inference while accommodating massive number of heterogeneous edge devices and (ii) Formulate customized performance metrics for FL that will facilitate in optimizing radio resource management. With proposed international collaboration, the project is anticipated to bring a disruptive shift in design paradigm of wireless edge networks, making them more suitable for FL. This project will have the consequential outcome of empowering the technological industry to design scalable digital services that Canadians can use with peace of mind, knowing that their personal information will remain securely stored on their wireless devices.