Prerequisites & Notation
Before You Begin
Chapter 18 closes the book by surveying the open problems at the frontier of secure and distributed computing over wireless networks. It presumes the full book as background: coded computing (Part II), secure aggregation (Part III), PIR (Part IV), and wireless FL (Part V). No new machinery is introduced — the chapter is a map of unsolved directions rather than a technical development.
- Coded computing (Part II)(Review ch05)
Self-check: State the recovery threshold of polynomial codes and its role in straggler mitigation.
- Secure aggregation (Part III)(Review ch10)
Self-check: Recall the honest-but-curious adversary model for SecAgg and the pairwise-masking bandwidth.
- Wireless FL (Chapter 17)(Review ch17)
Self-check: Recall the noise-floor structure of wireless-FL convergence under aggregation MSE.
- Modern ML primer
Self-check: Transformer attention, mixture-of- experts, and modern training recipes at a high level.
Notation for This Chapter
Chapter 18 reuses notation from Parts II-V. No new symbols are introduced; the chapter references existing ones.
| Symbol | Meaning | Introduced |
|---|---|---|
| Generic (possibly non-linear) computation at a worker | s01 | |
| Number of Byzantine workers (threat parameter) | s02 | |
| Differential-privacy parameters | s02 | |
| Decentralized-FL communication graph | s03 | |
| Graph mixing time | s03 | |
| Number of experts in an MoE model | s04 | |
| Quantum PIR capacity | s04 |