Nodes selection review for federated learning in the blockchain‐based internet of things

Abstract

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) gained momentum these last few years pushed by the emergence of fast and reliable communication networks such as 5G and beyond. IoT depends on collecting information from the environment, leading to a significant increase in the amount of data generated that needs to be transmitted, saved, and analyzed. It is clear that classical deterministic approaches might not be suitable to this complex and fast evolving environment. Hence, machine learning techniques with their ability to handle such a dynamic context, are rising in popularity. In particular, Federated Learning architectures which are better suited to the distributed nature of IoT and its privacy concerns. Besides, to address security risks such as model poisoning, device compromise, and network interception, Blockchain (BC) is seen as the secure and distributed underlying communication infrastructure of choice. This integration of IoT, FL, and BC remains in its early stages and several challenges arise. Indeed, nodes selection to perform resource intensive and critical operations like model learning and transactions validation is a crucial issue considering the strong heterogeneity of the involved devices in terms of resources. In this paper, we propose an original literature review including a taxonomy, a thorough analysis, a comparison of the proposed approaches, along with some open research directions.