CloudFL: A Zero-Touch Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-aware Sensor Cloud

Intelligent sensing solutions bridge the gap between the physical world and the cyber-physical systems by digitizing the sensor data collected from sensor devices. Sensor cloud networks provide physical and virtual sensing device resources and enable uninterrupted intelligent solutions to end-users. Thanks to advancements in machine learning algorithms and big data, the automation of mundane tasks with artificial intelligence is becoming a reliable smart option. However, existing approaches based on centralized Machine Learning (ML) on sensor cloud networks fail to ensure data privacy. Moreover, centralized ML works with the pre-requisite to transfer the entire training dataset from end devices to a central server. To address this, we propose a Quantized Federated Learning (FL) based approach, called CloudFL, to ensure data privacy on end devices in a sensor cloud network. Our framework enables a personalized version of FL implementation and enhances privacy and security with cryptosystem tools to obfuscate the information of the FL process from unauthorized access. Furthermore, microservices of our approach provide software as a service implementation of FL with instances of cloud servers that require zero-touch on local data for training.