Reconstructed Graph Neural Network With Knowledge Distillation for Lightweight Anomaly Detection

The proliferation of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies in modern smart society enables massive data exchange for offering intelligent services. It becomes essential to ensure secure communications while exchanging highly sensitive IoT data efficiently, which leads to high demands for lightweight models or algorithms with limited computation capability provided by individual IoT devices. In this study, a graph representation learning model, which seamlessly incorporates graph neural network (GNN) and knowledge distillation (KD) techniques, named reconstructed graph with global-local distillation (RG-GLD), is designed to realize the lightweight anomaly detection across IoT communication networks. In particular, a new graph network reconstruction strategy, which treats data communications as nodes in a directed graph while edges are then connected according to two specifically defined rules, is devised and applied to facilitate the graph representation learning in secure and efficient IoT communications. Both the structural and traffic features are then extracted from the graph data and flow data respectively, based on the graph attention network (GAT) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) techniques. These can benefit the GNN-based KD process in accordance with the more effective feature fusion and representation, considering both structural and data levels across the dynamic IoT networks. Furthermore, a lightweight local subgraph preservation mechanism improved by the graph attention mechanism and downsampling scheme to better utilize the topological information, and a so-called global information alignment defined based on the self-attention mechanism to effectively preserve the global information, are developed and incorporated in a refined graph attention based KD scheme. Compared with four different baseline methods, experiments and evaluations conducted based on two public datasets demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of our proposed model in improving the efficiency of knowledge transfer with higher classification accuracy but lower computational load, which can be deployed for lightweight anomaly detection in sustainable IoT computing environments.