Reputation-Based Federated Learning for Secure Wireless Networks

Abstract

The dilemma between the ever-increasing demands for data processing, and the limited capabilities of mobile devices in a wireless communication system calls for the appearance of federated learning (FL). As a distributed machine learning (ML) method, FL executes in an iterative manner by distributing the global model parameters and aggregating the local model parameters, which avoids the transmission of huge raw data and preserves data privacy during the training process. However, since FL cannot control the local training and transmission process, this gives malicious users the opportunity to deteriorate the global aggregation. We adopt a reputation model based on beta distribution function to measure the credibility of local users, and propose a reputation-based scheduling policy with user fairness constraint. By taking into account the impact of wireless channel conditions and malicious attack features, we derive tractable expressions for the convergence rate of FL in a wireless setting. Moreover, we validate the superiority of the proposed reputation-based scheduling policy via numerical analysis and empirical simulations. The results show that the proposed secure wireless FL framework can not only distinguish malicious users from normal users but also effectively defend against several typical attack types featured in attack intensity and attack frequency. The analysis also reveals that the effect of average attack intensity on the convergence performance of FL is dominated by the percentage of malicious user equipments (UEs), and imposes even greater negative effect on the convergence performance of FL as the percentage of malicious UEs increases.