CoLearn

2021

Applying Federated Learning (FL) on Internet-of-Things devices is necessitated by the large volumes of data they produce and growing concerns of data privacy. However, there are three challenges that need to be addressed to make FL efficient: (i) execute on devices with limited computational capabilities, (ii) account for stragglers due to computational heterogeneity of devices, and (iii) adapt to the changing network bandwidths. This paper presents FedAdapt, an adaptive offloading FL framework to mitigate the aforementioned challenges. FedAdapt accelerates local training in computationally constrained devices by leveraging layer offloading of deep neural networks (DNNs) to servers. Further, FedAdapt adopts reinforcement learning based optimization and clustering to adaptively identify which layers of the DNN should be offloaded for each individual device on to a server to tackle the challenges of computational heterogeneity and changing network bandwidth. Experimental studies are carried out on a lab-based testbed comprising five IoT devices. By offloading a DNN from the device to the server FedAdapt reduces the training time of a typical IoT device by over half compared to classic FL. The training time of extreme stragglers and the overall training time can be reduced by up to 57%. Furthermore, with changing network bandwidth, FedAdapt is demonstrated to reduce the training time by up to 40% when compared to classic FL, without sacrificing accuracy. FedAdapt can be downloaded from https://github.com/qub-blesson/FedAdapt.

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) in particular, play a vital role in providing smart services to the industry. These techniques however suffer from privacy and security concerns since data is collected from clients and then stored and processed at a central location. Federated Learning (FL), an architecture in which model parameters are exchanged instead of client data, has been proposed as a solution to these concerns. Nevertheless, FL trains a global model by communicating with clients over communication rounds, which introduces more traffic on the network and increases the convergence time to the target accuracy. In this work, we solve the problem of optimizing accuracy in stateful FL with a budgeted number of candidate clients by selecting the best candidate clients in terms of test accuracy to participate in the training process. Next, we propose an online stateful FL heuristic to find the best candidate clients. Additionally, we propose an IoT client alarm application that utilizes the proposed heuristic in training a stateful FL global model based on IoT device type classification to alert clients about unauthorized IoT devices in their environment. To test the efficiency of the proposed online heuristic, we conduct several experiments using a real dataset and compare the results against state-of-the-art algorithms. Our results indicate that the proposed heuristic outperforms the online random algorithm with up to 27% gain in accuracy. Additionally, the performance of the proposed online heuristic is comparable to the performance of the best offline algorithm.

IEEE Network, 2021

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning technique, where each device contributes to the learning model by independently computing the gradient based on its local training data. It has recently become a hot research topic, as it promises several benefits related to data privacy and scalability. However, implementing FL at the network edge is challenging due to system and data heterogeneity and resources constraints. In this article, we examine the existing challenges and trade-offs in Federated Edge Learning (FEEL). The design of FEEL algorithms for resources-efficient learning raises several challenges. These challenges are essentially related to the multidisciplinary nature of the problem. As the data is the key component of the learning, this article advocates a new set of considerations for data characteristics in wireless scheduling algorithms in FEEL. Hence, we propose a general framework for the data-aware scheduling as a guideline for future research directions. We also discuss the main axes and requirements for data evaluation and some exploitable techniques and metrics.

Research Square (Research Square), 2024

Federated learning and edge computing have resulted in the broad adoption of internet of Things (IoT) due to their fast reaction times and low connection costs. In general, edge computing requires users to send raw data to a central server for further processing. However, this data frequently contains sensitive information that individuals may not want to disclose. As a result, transferring user data with sensitive information increases the risk of data leakage when various unauthorized devices access it. Integrating federated learning with edge computing improves privacy by creating a consistent deep learning model across devices, eliminating the need for real data transferring but the complexity and heterogeneity of the IoT environment present challenges like privacy, low communication, incentives, and seamless data aggregation. In this work, we concentrate on improving privacy with communication stability and designing incentive mechanisms to motivate more clients to participate in the model training process to enhance the performance and accuracy of data aggregation in a highly trusted environment. As a result, the novelty point is the development of a framework that combined a blockchain with federated edge computing in the context of beyond 5G to address the aforementioned challenges and provide excellent communicative and trusted environment. The study's rigorous evaluation showed that the integration of blockchain and B5G technology significantly improved the overall process of federated edge computing including increased accuracy, prevented loss, and motivated more clients to participate in the training process.

arXiv (Cornell University), 2021

The Internet of Things (IoT) is on the verge of a major paradigm shift. In the IoT system of the future, IoFT, the "cloud" will be substituted by the "crowd" where model training is brought to the edge, allowing IoT devices to collaboratively extract knowledge and build smart analytics/models while keeping their personal data stored locally. This paradigm shift was set into motion by the tremendous increase in computational power on IoT devices and the recent advances in decentralized and privacypreserving model training, coined as federated learning (FL). This article provides a vision for IoFT and a systematic overview of current efforts towards realizing this vision. Specifically, we first introduce the defining characteristics of IoFT and discuss FL data-driven approaches, opportunities, and challenges that allow decentralized inference within three dimensions: (i) a global model that maximizes utility across all IoT devices, (ii) a personalized model that borrows strengths across all devices yet retains its own model, (iii) a meta-learning model that quickly adapts to new devices or learning tasks. We end by describing the vision and challenges of IoFT in reshaping different industries through the lens of domain experts. Those industries include manufacturing, transportation, energy, healthcare, quality & reliability, business, and computing.

2022

In this paper, we propose a new comprehensive realistic cyber security dataset of IoT and IIoT applications, called Edge-IIoTset, which can be used by machine learning-based intrusion detection systems in two different modes, namely, centralized and federated learning. Specifically, the proposed testbed is organized into seven layers, including, Cloud Computing Layer, Network Functions Virtualization Layer, Blockchain Network Layer, Fog Computing Layer, Software-Defined Networking Layer, Edge Computing Layer, and IoT and IIoT Perception Layer. In each layer, we use new emerging technologies that satisfy the key requirements of IoT and IIoT applications, such as, ThingsBoard IoT platform, OPNFV platform, Hyperledger Sawtooth, Digital twin, ONOS SDN controller, Mosquitto MQTT brokers, Modbus TCP/IP, ...etc. The IoT data are generated from various IoT devices (more than 10 types) such as Low-cost digital sensors for sensing temperature and humidity, Ultrasonic sensor, Water level detec...

arXiv (Cornell University), 2022

Federated Learning (FL) is a novel distributed privacy-preserving learning paradigm, which enables the collaboration among several participants (e.g., Internet of Things devices) for the training of machine learning models. However, selecting the participants that would contribute to this collaborative training is highly challenging. Adopting a random selection strategy would entail substantial problems due to the heterogeneity in terms of data quality, and computational and communication resources across the participants. Although several approaches have been proposed in the literature to overcome the problem of random selection, most of these approaches follow a unilateral selection strategy. In fact, they base their selection strategy on only the federated server's side, while overlooking the interests of the client devices in the process. To overcome this problem, we present in this paper FedMint, an intelligent client selection approach for federated learning on IoT devices using game theory and bootstrapping mechanism. Our solution involves the design of: (1) preference functions for the client IoT devices and federated servers to allow them to rank each other according to several factors such as accuracy and price, (2) intelligent matching algorithms that take into account the preferences of both parties in their design, and (3) bootstrapping technique that capitalizes on the collaboration of multiple federated servers in order to assign initial accuracy value for the newly connected IoT devices. Based on our simulation findings, our strategy surpasses the VanillaFL selection approach in terms of maximizing both the revenues of the client devices and accuracy of the global federated learning model.

IEEE Access

Our daily lives are significantly impacted by intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) application, services, IoT gadgets, and more intelligent industries. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is anticipated to have a substantial impact on training machine learning algorithms on IoT devices without sharing data. As data privacy has become a serious societal concern, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a hot research area for enabling the collaborative training of machine learning models across many smart IoT devices while adhering to privacy constraints. Although, FL is utilized for preserving privacy in IoT networks, but it is also facing some challenges such as privacy, effectiveness, and efficiency. In this article, a taxonomy of FL-based IoT systems is proposed and an analysis of related works on FL-based IoT systems is presented. Further, a comprehensive study of various types of threats, attacks, and frameworks is done. In addition to this, a taxonomy of privacy-preserving FL techniques for IoT networks is also devised. Finally, the study is concluded by highlighting the various open research challenges in FL-based IoT networks. INDEX TERMS Privacy-preserving techniques, federated learning, Internet of Things, security, privacy, attacks.

Rabindra Bharati University Journal of Economics, 2024

The importance of data security and privacy is rising in tandem with the need for machine learning models. One potential answer that has recently arisen is federated learning, a decentralised method of machine learning that enables several entities to work together and construct models without disclosing private information. With an emphasis on its privacy-preserving features, this allencompassing examination delves into the concepts, methods, and uses of federated learning.

Computer Networks

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) lays a new paradigm for the concept of Industry 4.0 and paves an insight for new industrial era. Nowadays smart machines and smart factories use machine learning/deep learning based models for incurring intelligence. However, storing and communicating the data to the cloud and end device leads to issues in preserving privacy. In order to address this issue, federated learning (FL) technology is implemented in IIoT by the researchers nowadays to provide safe, accurate, robust and unbiased models. Integrating FL in IIoT ensures that no local sensitive data is exchanged, as the distribution of learning models over the edge devices has become more common with FL. Therefore, only the encrypted notifications and parameters are communicated to the central server. In this paper, we provide a thorough overview on integrating FL with IIoT in terms of privacy, resource and data management. The survey starts by articulating IIoT characteristics and fundamentals of distributive and FL. The motivation behind integrating IIoT and FL for achieving data privacy preservation and on-device learning are summarized. Then we discuss the potential of using machine learning, deep learning and blockchain techniques for FL in secure IIoT. Further we analyze and summarize the ways to handle the heterogeneous and huge data. Comprehensive background on data and resource management are then presented, followed by applications of IIoT with FL in healthcare and automobile industry. Finally, we shed light on challenges, some possible solutions and potential directions for future research.