Blockchain-Supported Federated Learning for Trustworthy Vehicular Networks

The advances in today’s IoT devices and machine learning methods have given rise to the concept of Federated Learning. Through such a technique, a plethora of network devices collaboratively train and update a mutual machine learning model while protecting their individual data-sets. Federated learning proves its effectiveness in tackling communication efficiency and privacy-safeguarding issues. Moreover, blockchain was introduced to solve many network issues in regard to data privacy and network single point of failure. In this article, we introduce a solution that integrates both federated learning and blockchain to ensure both data privacy and network security. We present a framework to decentralize the mutual machine learning models on end-devices. A blockchain-based consensus solution as a second line of privacy is used to ensure trustworthy shared training on the fog. The proposed model enables on-end device machine learning without any centralized training of the data nor coordination by utilizing a consensus method in the blockchain. We evaluate and verify our proposed model through simulation to showcase the effectiveness of the adapted scheme in terms of accuracy, energy consumption, and lifetime rate, along with throughput and latency metrics. The proposed model performs with an accuracy rate of ≈ 0.97.