FedLAM: Low-latency Wireless Federated Learning via Layer-wise Adaptive Modulation

Abstract: In wireless federated learning (FL), the clients need to transmit the high-dimensional deep neural network (DNN) parameters through bandwidth-limited channels, which causes the communication latency issue. In this paper, we propose a layer-wise adaptive modulation scheme to save the communication latency. Unlike existing works which assign the same modulation level for all DNN layers, we consider the layers' importance which provides more freedom to save the latency. The proposed scheme can automatically decide the optimal modulation levels for different DNN layers. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can save up to 73.9% of communication latency compared with the existing schemes.