Mitigating System Bias in Resource Constrained Asynchronous Federated Learning Systems

Federated learning (FL) systems face performance challenges in dealing with heterogeneous devices and non-identically distributed data across clients. We propose a dynamic global model aggregation method within Asynchronous Federated Learning (AFL) deployments to address these issues. Our aggregation method scores and adjusts the weighting of client model updates based on their upload frequency to accommodate differences in device capabilities. Additionally, we also immediately provide an updated global model to clients after they upload their local models to reduce idle time and improve training efficiency. We evaluate our approach within an AFL deployment consisting of 10 simulated clients with heterogeneous compute constraints and non-IID data. The simulation results, using the FashionMNIST dataset, demonstrate over 10% and 19% improvement in global model accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods PAPAYA and FedAsync, respectively. Our dynamic aggregation method allows reliable global model training despite limiting client resources and statistical data heterogeneity. This improves robustness and scalability for real-world FL deployments.

Past, Present, Future: A Comprehensive Exploration of AI Use Cases in the UMBRELLA IoT Testbed

UMBRELLA is a large-scale, open-access Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem incorporating over 200 multi-sensor multi-wireless nodes, 20 collaborative robots, and edge-intelligence-enabled devices. This paper provides a guide to the implemented and prospective artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities of UMBRELLA in real-world IoT systems. Four existing UMBRELLA applications are presented in detail: 1) An automated streetlight monitoring for detecting issues and triggering maintenance alerts; 2) A Digital twin of building environments providing enhanced air quality sensing with reduced cost; 3) A large-scale Federated Learning framework for reducing communication overhead; and 4) An intrusion detection for containerised applications identifying malicious activities. Additionally, the potential of UMBRELLA is outlined for future smart city and multi-robot crowdsensing applications enhanced by semantic communications and multi-agent planning. Finally, to realise the above use-cases we discuss the need for a tailored MLOps platform to automate UMBRELLA model pipelines and establish trust.

FROST: Towards Energy-efficient AI-on-5G Platforms -- A GPU Power Capping Evaluation

The Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) is a burgeoning market with projected growth in the upcoming years. RAN has the highest CAPEX impact on the network and, most importantly, consumes 73% of its total energy. That makes it an ideal target for optimisation through the integration of Machine Learning (ML). However, the energy consumption of ML is frequently overlooked in such ecosystems. Our work addresses this critical aspect by presenting FROST - Flexible Reconfiguration method with Online System Tuning - a solution for energy-aware ML pipelines that adhere to O-RAN's specifications and principles. FROST is capable of profiling the energy consumption of an ML pipeline and optimising the hardware accordingly, thereby limiting the power draw. Our findings indicate that FROST can achieve energy savings of up to 26.4% without compromising the model's accuracy or introducing significant time delays.

Federated Deep Learning for Intrusion Detection in IoT Networks

The vast increase of IoT technologies and the ever-evolving attack vectors and threat actors have increased cyber-security risks dramatically. Novel attacks can compromise IoT devices to gain access to sensitive data or control them to deploy further malicious activities. The detection of novel attacks often relies upon AI solutions. A common approach to implementing AI-based IDS in distributed IoT systems is in a centralised manner. However, this approach may violate data privacy and secrecy. In addition, centralised data collection prohibits the scale-up of IDSs. Therefore, intrusion detection solutions in IoT ecosystems need to move towards a decentralised direction. FL has attracted significant interest in recent years due to its ability to perform collaborative learning while preserving data confidentiality and locality. Nevertheless, most FL-based IDS for IoT systems are designed under unrealistic data distribution conditions. To that end, we design an experiment representative of the real world and evaluate the performance of two FL IDS implementations, one based on DNNs and another on our previous work on DBNs. For our experiments, we rely on TON-IoT, a realistic IoT network traffic dataset, associating each IP address with a single FL client. Additionally, we explore pre-training and investigate various aggregation methods to mitigate the impact of data heterogeneity. Lastly, we benchmark our approach against a centralised solution. The comparison shows that the heterogeneous nature of the data has a considerable negative impact on the model performance when trained in a distributed manner. However, in the case of a pre-trained initial global FL model, we demonstrate a performance improvement of over 20% (F1-score) when compared against a randomly initiated global model.

FLARE: Detection and Mitigation of Concept Drift for Federated Learning based IoT Deployments

Intelligent, large-scale IoT ecosystems have become possible due to recent advancements in sensing technologies, distributed learning, and low-power inference in embedded devices. In traditional cloud-centric approaches, raw data is transmitted to a central server for training and inference purposes. On the other hand, Federated Learning migrates both tasks closer to the edge nodes and endpoints. This allows for a significant reduction in data exchange while preserving the privacy of users. Trained models, though, may under-perform in dynamic environments due to changes in the data distribution, affecting the model's ability to infer accurately; this is referred to as concept drift. Such drift may also be adversarial in nature. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to detect such behaviours promptly. In order to simultaneously reduce communication traffic and maintain the integrity of inference models, we introduce FLARE, a novel lightweight dual-scheduler FL framework that conditionally transfers training data, and deploys models between edge and sensor endpoints based on observing the model's training behaviour and inference statistics, respectively. We show that FLARE can significantly reduce the amount of data exchanged between edge and sensor nodes compared to fixed-interval scheduling methods (over 5x reduction), is easily scalable to larger systems, and can successfully detect concept drift reactively with at least a 16x reduction in latency.

Hierarchical and Decentralised Federated Learning

Federated learning has shown enormous promise as a way of training ML models in distributed environments while reducing communication costs and protecting data privacy. However, the rise of complex cyber-physical systems, such as the Internet-of-Things, presents new challenges that are not met with traditional FL methods. Hierarchical Federated Learning extends the traditional FL process to enable more efficient model aggregation based on application needs or characteristics of the deployment environment (e.g., resource capabilities and/or network connectivity). It illustrates the benefits of balancing processing across the cloud-edge continuum. Hierarchical Federated Learning is likely to be a key enabler for a wide range of applications, such as smart farming and smart energy management, as it can improve performance and reduce costs, whilst also enabling FL workflows to be deployed in environments that are not well-suited to traditional FL. Model aggregation algorithms, software frameworks, and infrastructures will need to be designed and implemented to make such solutions accessible to researchers and engineers across a growing set of domains. H-FL also introduces a number of new challenges. For instance, there are implicit infrastructural challenges. There is also a trade-off between having generalised models and personalised models. If there exist geographical patterns for data (e.g., soil conditions in a smart farm likely are related to the geography of the region itself), then it is crucial that models used locally can consider their own locality in addition to a globally-learned model. H-FL will be crucial to future FL solutions as it can aggregate and distribute models at multiple levels to optimally serve the trade-off between locality dependence and global anomaly robustness.

Toward Multi-Service Edge-Intelligence Paradigm: Temporal-Adaptive Prediction for Time-Critical Control over Wireless

Time-critical control applications typically pose stringent connectivity requirements for communication networks. The imperfections associated with the wireless medium such as packet losses, synchronization errors, and varying delays have a detrimental effect on performance of real-time control, often with safety implications. This paper introduces multi-service edge-intelligence as a new paradigm for realizing time-critical control over wireless. It presents the concept of multi-service edge-intelligence which revolves around tight integration of wireless access, edge-computing and machine learning techniques, in order to provide stability guarantees under wireless imperfections. The paper articulates some of the key system design aspects of multi-service edge-intelligence. It also presents a temporal-adaptive prediction technique to cope with dynamically changing wireless environments. It provides performance results in a robotic teleoperation scenario. Finally, it discusses some open research and design challenges for multi-service edge-intelligence.

Demo: LE3D: A Privacy-preserving Lightweight Data Drift Detection Framework

This paper presents LE3D; a novel data drift detection framework for preserving data integrity and confidentiality. LE3D is a generalisable platform for evaluating novel drift detection mechanisms within the Internet of Things (IoT) sensor deployments. Our framework operates in a distributed manner, preserving data privacy while still being adaptable to new sensors with minimal online reconfiguration. Our framework currently supports multiple drift estimators for time-series IoT data and can easily be extended to accommodate new data types and drift detection mechanisms. This demo will illustrate the functionality of LE3D under a real-world-like scenario.

LE3D: A Lightweight Ensemble Framework of Data Drift Detectors for Resource-Constrained Devices

Data integrity becomes paramount as the number of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor deployments increases. Sensor data can be altered by benign causes or malicious actions. Mechanisms that detect drifts and irregularities can prevent disruptions and data bias in the state of an IoT application. This paper presents LE3D, an ensemble framework of data drift estimators capable of detecting abnormal sensor behaviours. Working collaboratively with surrounding IoT devices, the type of drift (natural/abnormal) can also be identified and reported to the end-user. The proposed framework is a lightweight and unsupervised implementation able to run on resource-constrained IoT devices. Our framework is also generalisable, adapting to new sensor streams and environments with minimal online reconfiguration. We compare our method against state-of-the-art ensemble data drift detection frameworks, evaluating both the real-world detection accuracy as well as the resource utilisation of the implementation. Experimenting with real-world data and emulated drifts, we show the effectiveness of our method, which achieves up to 97% of detection accuracy while requiring minimal resources to run.