Blockchain and Federated Learning for 5G Beyond

In 5G and beyond networks, the increasing inclusion of heterogeneous smart devices and the rising privacy and security concerns, are two crucial challenges in terms of computation complexity and privacy preservation for Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solutions. In this regard, federated learning emerges as a new technique, which enlarges the scale of training data, and protects the privacy of user data. The development of edge computing makes it possible to apply federated learning to beyond 5G. However, the security of local parameters, the learning quality, and the varying computing and communication resources, are crucial issues that remain unexplored in federated learning schemes. In this article, we propose a block-chain empowered federated learning framework, and present its potential application scenarios in beyond 5G. We enhance the security and privacy by integrating blockchain into a federated learning scheme for maintaining the trained parameters. In particular, we formulate the resource sharing task as a combinational optimization problem while taking resource consumption and learning quality into account. We design a deep reinforcement learning based algorithm to find an optimal solution to the problem. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves high accuracy and good convergence.