Fairness-Aware Incentive Mechanism for Multi-Server Federated Learning in Edge-Enabled Wireless Networks With Differential Privacy
Yu Meng Yang, Kai Peng, Shangguang Wang, Xiaolong Xu, Peiyun Xiao, Victor C. M. Leung · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2025
As a distributed machine learning method, federated learning (FL) can collaboratively train a global model with multiple devices without sharing the original data, thus protecting certain privacy. However, due to the strong heterogeneity of edge nodes (ENs) participating in FL, the quality of data uploaded to the parameter server (PS) varies significantly. Without an appropriate incentive mechanism, low-quality contributors may receive disproportionately high rewards, while high-quality contributors may lack sufficient motivation, leading to inefficient participation and suboptimal global model performance. Consequently, it is critical to develop an effective incentive mechanism to promote fairness for the FL process. To address the issues of existing FL incentive mechanisms lacking privacy protection performance analysis, we propose a fairness-aware incentive mechanism for multi-server FL in edge-enabled wireless differential privacy (DP) networks. Specifically, the wireless channel noise is used to provide DP protection for the local model gradients uploaded by ENs. Next, the interaction between the PSs and ENs is modeled as a Stackelberg game. Furthermore, we solve the Stackelberg game process using backward induction and theoretically propose optimal strategies for both the PSs and ENs. Finally, extensive numerical simulations using real datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our theoretical analysis of the proposed scheme.