Fair and autonomous sharing of federate learning models in mobile Internet of Things

Federate learning can conduct machine learning as well as protect the privacy of self-owned training data on corresponding ends, instead of having to upload to a central trusted data aggregation server. In mobile scenarios, a centralized trusted server may not be existing, and even though it exists, the delay will not be manageable, e.g., smart driving cars. Thus, mobile federate learning at the edge with privacy-awareness is attracted more and more attentions. It then imposes a problem - after data are trained on a mobile terminal to obtain a learned model, how to share the model parameters among others to create more accurate and robust accumulative final model. This kind of model sharing confronts several challenges, e.g., the sharing must be conducted without a third trusted party (autonomously), and the sharing must be fair as model training (by training data)is valuable. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a smart contract and IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System) based model sharing protocol and algorithms to address the challenges. The proposed protocol does not rely on a trusted third party, where individual-learned models are shared/stored in corresponding ends. Conducted through extensive experiments, three main steps of the proposed protocol are evaluated. The average executive time of the three steps are 0.059s, 0.060s and 0.032s, demonstrating its efficiency.