Domain-Aware Hierarchical Federated Learning for UAV Swarms Across Heterogeneous Environments

Abstract

Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) enables communication-efficient training in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms, but performance degrades under changing and heterogeneous environments. This paper proposes domain-aware HFL (DA-HFL), integrating mobility-informed clustering, cluster-level aggregation, cloud-based Fisher-weighted merging, a domain-adversarial shared backbone, environment-specific heads, and gated inference with local adaptation. A mission-weighted optimization formulation incorporates energy, latency, and cluster-head eligibility constraints. Theoretical analysis establishes resource feasibility, a conditional backbone-stationarity bound, the quadratic optimality of Fisher-weighted merging, and communication and computation complexity bounds. Simulations across four heterogeneous environments demonstrate faster convergence, improved accuracy during environmental transitions, and more stable, purer clusters than the evaluated baselines, with modest energy overhead over resource-aware HFL. Ablation studies validate the contributions of the proposed components.