Coded Computing for Half-Duplex Wireless Distributed Computing Systems via Interference Alignment

Distributed computing frameworks such as MapReduce and Spark are often used to process large-scale data computing jobs. In wireless scenarios, exchanging data among distributed nodes would seriously suffer from the communication bottleneck due to limited communication resources such as bandwidth and power. To address this problem, we propose a coded parallel computing (CPC) scheme for distributed computing systems where distributed nodes exchange information over a half-duplex wireless interference network. The CPC scheme achieves the multicast gain by utilizing coded computing to multicast coded symbols intended to multiple receiver nodes and the cooperative transmission gain by allowing multiple transmitter nodes to jointly deliver messages via interference alignment. To measure communication performance, we apply the widely used latency-oriented metric: normalized delivery time (NDT). It is shown that CPC can significantly reduce the NDT by jointly exploiting the parallel transmission and coded multicasting opportunities. Surprisingly, when the number of computation nodes K tends to infinity and the computation load is fixed, CPC approaches zero NDT while all state-of-the-art schemes achieve positive values of NDT. Finally, we establish an information-theoretic lower bound for the NDT-computation load trade-off over the half-duplex network, and prove our scheme achieves the minimum NDT within a multiplicative gap of 3, i.e., our scheme is order optimal.