Energy-Efficient Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Pinching Antenna Systems

2026-02-15

AI Summary

This work addresses the high energy consumption of conventional MIMO servers in over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL) by introducing, for the first time, a tunable Pinching Antenna System (PASS) to replace power-hungry fully digital MIMO architectures. By jointly optimizing PASS parameters, device scheduling, and over-the-air computation, the proposed approach leverages PASS’s unique capabilities—namely, diffraction-based propagation and compensation of large-scale fading—to significantly reduce the energy required for model aggregation. Under a single-waveguide PASS deployment, the scheme achieves substantial improvements in energy efficiency compared to traditional MIMO systems, thereby demonstrating the feasibility and advantages of PASS for enabling low-complexity, low-power OTA-FL.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Distributed Machine Learning & Federated Learning
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Federated recommendation systems and personalization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Efficiency and scalability of Web search engines

Abstract

Pinching antennas systems (PASSs) have recently been proposed as a novel flexible-antenna technology. These systems are implemented by attaching low-cost pinching elements to dielectric waveguides. As the direct link is bypassed through waveguides, PASSs can effectively compensate large-scale effects of the wireless channel. This work explores the potential gains of employing PASSs for over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL). For a PASS-assisted server, we develop a low-complexity algorithmic approach, which jointly tunes the PASS parameters and schedules the mobile devices for minimal energy consumption in OTA-FL. We study the efficiency of the proposed design and compare it against the conventional OTA-FL setting with MIMO server. Numerical experiments demonstrate that using a single-waveguide PASS at the server within a moderately sized area, the required energy for model aggregation is drastically reduced as compared to the case with fully-digital MIMO server. This introduces PASS as a potential technology for energy-efficient distributed learning in next generations of wireless systems.

Problem

• Energy-Efficient
• Over-the-Air Federated Learning
• Pinching Antenna Systems
• Model Aggregation
• Wireless Communication

Innovation

• Pinching Antenna Systems
• Over-the-Air Federated Learning
• Energy Efficiency
• Waveguide-based Antennas
• Low-complexity Optimization