FLORAS: Differentially Private Wireless Federated Learning Using Orthogonal Sequences

We propose a novel private-preserving uplink over-the-air computation (AirComp) method, termed FLORAS, for wireless federated learning (FL) systems. From the communication design perspective, FLORAS eliminates the requirement of channel state information at the transmitters (CSIT) by leveraging the properties of orthogonal sequences. From the privacy perspective, we prove that FLORAS can offer pure differential privacy (DP) guarantee, and explicitly characterize the achievable <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\epsilon$</tex>-DP level as a function of the FLORAS parameter configuration. A novel FL convergence bound is derived which, combined with the pure DP guarantee, allows for a smooth tradeoff between convergence rate and DP guarantee levels. Experiments based on real-world datasets not only corroborate the theoretical findings but also empirically demonstrate the communication and privacy advantages of FLORAS over state-of-the-art AirComp methods.