When Crowdsensing Meets Federated Learning: Privacy-Preserving Mobile Crowdsensing System

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is an emerging sensing data collection pattern with scalability, low deployment cost, and distributed characteristics. Traditional MCS systems suffer from privacy concerns and fair reward distribution. Moreover, existing privacy-preserving MCS solutions usually focus on the privacy protection of data collection rather than that of data processing. To tackle faced problems of MCS, in this paper, we integrate federated learning (FL) into MCS and propose a privacy-preserving MCS system, called CROWDFL. Specifically, in order to protect privacy, participants locally process sensing data via federated learning and only upload encrypted training models. Particularly, a privacy-preserving federated averaging algorithm is proposed to average encrypted training models. To reduce computation and communication overhead of restraining dropped participants, discard and retransmission strategies are designed. Besides, a privacy-preserving posted pricing incentive mechanism is designed, which tries to break the dilemma of privacy protection and data evaluation. Theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation on a practical MCS application demonstrate the proposed CROWDFL can effectively protect participants privacy and is feasible and efficient.