Description:
Reference #:
The University of South Carolina is offering licensing opportunities for Methods for wireless unsupervised federated clustering with over-the-air computation.
Background:
Over-the-air computation (OAC) is a physical layer concept that can benefit a wide variety of applications for function computation over a bandwidth-limited wireless channel by reducing resource utilization to a one-time cost that does not scale with the number of edge devices (EDs). It exploits the signal superposition property of wireless multiple-access channels to compute a set of special mathematical functions such as arithmetic mean and sum. With the increased attention to computation-oriented applications over wireless networks, OAC has been utilized as a fundamental tool to improve communication latency.
Invention Description:
An over-the-air computation (OAC) scheme for the federated k-means clustering algorithm to reduce the per-round communication latency when it is implemented over a wireless network. Also, a re-initialization method for ineffectively used centroids is proposed to improve the performance of the proposed method for heterogeneous data distribution.
Potential Applications:
This scheme can be applied to reduce communication latency in wireless networks that employ a k-means algorithm in a federated manner.
Advantages and Benefits:
This method will improve latency by computing via signal superposition, enhance data privacy with OAC, and make computation reliable without using the channel state information at the devices.