Communication-Efficient Federated Learning in UAV-enabled IoV: A Joint Auction-Coalition Approach

Due to the advanced capabilities of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) components such as vehicles, Roadside Units (RSUs) and smart devices as well as the increasing amount of data generated, Federated Learning (FL) becomes a promising tool given that it enables privacy-preserving machine learning. However, the performance of the FL suffers from the failure of communication links and missing nodes. Therefore, we propose the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as wireless relays to facilitate the communications between the IoV components and the FL server and thus improving the accuracy of the FL. However, a single UAV may not have sufficient resources for all iterations of the FL process. In this paper, we present a joint auction-coalition formation framework. The joint auctioncoalition formation algorithm is proposed to achieve a stable partition of UAV coalitions in which an auction scheme is applied. The auction scheme is designed to take into account the preferences of IoV components over heterogeneous UAVs. The simulation results show that the grand coalition, where all UAVs join a single coalition, is not always stable due to the profitmaximizing behavior of the UAVs. In addition, we show that as the cooperation cost of the UAVs increases, the UAVs prefer not to form any coalition.