Decentralized Federated Learning for UAV Networks: Architecture, Challenges, and Opportunities

Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or say drones, are envisioned to support extensive applications in next-generation wireless networks in both civil and military fields. Empowering UAVs networks intelligence by AI especially ML techniques is inevitable and appealing to enable the aforementioned applications. To solve the problems of traditional cloud-centric ML for UAV networks such as privacy concern, unacceptable latency, and resource burden, a distributed ML technique, \textit(i.e.), federated learning (FL), has been recently proposed to enable multiple UAVs to collaboratively train ML model without letting out raw data. However, almost all existing FL paradigms are still centralized, \textit{i.e.}, a central entity is in charge of ML model aggregation and fusion over the whole network, which could result in the issue of a single point of failure and are inappropriate to UAV networks with both unreliable nodes and links. Thus motivated, in this article, we propose a novel architecture called DFL-UN (\underline{D}ecentralized \underline{F}ederated \underline{L}earning for \underline{U}AV \underline{N}etworks), which enables FL within UAV networks without a central entity. We also conduct a preliminary simulation study to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the DFL-UN architecture. Finally, we discuss the main challenges and potential research directions in the DFL-UN.