Overview of Distributed Machine Learning Techniques for 6G Networks

The main goal of this paper is to survey the influential research of distributed learning technologies playing a key role in the 6G world. Upcoming 6G technology is expected to create an intelligent, highly scalable, dynamic, and programable wireless communication network able to serve many heterogeneous wireless devices. Various machine learning (ML) techniques are expected to be deployed over the intelligent 6G wireless network that provide solutions to highly complex networking problems. In order to do this, various 6G nodes and devices are expected to generate tons of data through external sensors, and data analysis will be needed. With such massive and distributed data, and various innovations in computing hardware, distributed ML techniques are expected to play an important role in 6G. Though they have several advantages over the centralized ML techniques, implementing the distributed ML algorithms over resource-constrained wireless environments can be challenging. Therefore, it is important to select a proper ML algorithm based upon the characteristics of the wireless environment and the resource requirements of the learning process. In this work, we survey the recently introduced distributed ML techniques with their characteristics and possible benefits by focusing our attention on the most influential papers in the area. We finally give our perspective on the main challenges and advantages for telecommunication networks, along with the main scenarios that could eventuate.