This work studies gradient coding (GC) in the context of distributed training problems with unreliable communication. We propose cooperative GC (CoGC), a novel gradient-sharing-based GC framework that leverages cooperative communication among clients. This approach eliminates the need for dataset replication, making it communication- and computation-efficient and suitable for federated learning (FL). By employing the standard GC decoding mechanism, CoGC yields strictly binary outcomes: the global model is either recovered exactly or the recovery is meaningless, with no intermediate outcomes. This characteristic ensures the optimality of the training and demonstrates strong resilience to client-to-server communication failures. However, due to the limited flexibility of the recovery outcomes, the decoding mechanism may also result in communication inefficiency and hinder convergence, especially when communication channels among clients are in poor condition. To overcome this limitation and further exploit the potential of GC matrices, we propose a complementary decoding mechanism, termed GC+, which leverages information that would otherwise be discarded during GC decoding failures. This approach significantly improves system reliability against unreliable communication, as the full recovery1of the global model dominates in GC+. To conclude, this work establishes solid theoretical frameworks for both CoGC and GC+. We assess the system reliability by outage analyses and convergence analyses for each decoding mechanism, along with a rigorous investigation of how outages affect the structure and performance of GC matrices. Finally, the effectiveness of CoGC and GC+is validated through extensive simulations.

Stragglers’ effects are known to degrade FL performance. In this paper, we investigate federated learning (FL) over wireless networks in the presence of communication stragglers, where the power-constrained clients collaboratively train a global model by iteratively optimizing a local objective function with their local datasets and transmitting local model updates to the central parameter server (PS) through fading channels. To tackle communication stragglers without dataset sharing or prior information about the network at PS, we propose cooperative gradient coding (CoGC) for semi-decentralized FL to enable the exact global model recovery at PS. Furthermore, we conduct a thorough theoretical analysis of the proposed approach. Namely, an outage analysis of the proposed approach is provided, followed by a convergence analysis based on the failure probability of the global model recovery at PS. Nevertheless, simulation results reveal the superiority of the proposed approach in the presence of stragglers under imbalanced data distribution.