FedShip: Federated Over-the-Air Learning for Communication-Efficient and Privacy-Aware Smart Shipping in 6G Communications

Maritime and shipping are unambiguously the cornerstones of the global economy and transportation. To improve efficiency, maritime sector activities are focused on the realization of Smart Shipping (SMS), leveraging 6G Communications, Energy Efficiency (EE) and Machine Learning (ML). However, conventional Centralized Machine Learning (CML) cannot be easily applied in the maritime, mainly due to the drawbacks: (i) prohibitive data communication overhead and bandwidth limitations, since CML requires centralization of massive data through transmissions from heterogeneous sources, (ii) excessive energy consumption associated with massive data transfers, (iii) remarkable transmission errors due to harsh propagation conditions, and (iv) data privacy violation, since the data carries sensitive and commercial information. This article proposes a two-fold Federated Learning (FL) scheme (FedShip) to improve the privacy, EE and communication-efficiency of future 6G maritime networks. FedShip uses the Over-the-Air computation (AirComp) principles to exploit the signal superposition property and ensure that local models are accurately and efficiently combined. Using real data regarding the fuel consumption of multiple cargo ships, we compared the FL performance, building multiple timeseries forecasting models, with collaborative ML baselines. AirComp performance was also assessed using simulation data about channel measurements. After optimizing the hyperparameters of the local models, extensive results revealed that: (i) FL shows enhanced fuel prediction accuracy (95.5% relative to the CML), while ensuring data privacy and (ii) AirComp can be adopted to combine the local models with low computation error, offering significant EE and spectrum efficiency improvements, especially when dense 6G scenarios are considered.