Current and emerging mobile networks face increasing privacy, scalability, and performance challenges as distributed learning becomes essential for advanced 6G services. These challenges are amplified by the presence of non-IID data, naturally arising in heterogeneous wireless environments, that degrade the performance of standard Federated Learning (FL) approaches. To address non-IID data across clients, we propose a Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) framework that assigns clients to specialized models during training. Data-domain clustering initializes model-based clustering, enabling identification and exploitation of client similarities without sharing raw data while reducing communication cost.
Motivated by mmWave beam selection, we evaluate our methods on a wireless simulation dataset (DeepMIMO) and complement it with two non-IID benchmarks (FEMNIST, Rotated CIFAR-10) to isolate different non-IID characteristics. Our best configurations improve accuracy over IFCA by 4.8 pp on DeepMIMO and 10.6 pp on FEMNIST while reducing downlink data volume by 83.1 % on FEMNIST compared to IFCA.
We demonstrate that different clustering strategies suit different non-IID characteristics. These results show that our CFL methods enable resource-efficient, and high-performance distributed learning in future 6G networks.
Suggested Citation
@misc{isaksson2026communication,
title = {{Communication-Efficient Clustered Federated Learning in Non-IID Wireless Networks}},
author = {Martin Isaksson and Rickard C{\"{o}}ster and \v{S}ar\={u}nas Girdzijauskas and Seif Haridi},
year = {2026},
eprint = {2610.38970v1},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
primaryclass = {cs.LG},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2610.38970},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38970}
}Available
Communication-Efficient Clustered Federated Learning in Non-IID Wireless NetworksDOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2610.38970