FLITC: A Novel Federated Learning-Based Method for IoT Traffic Classification

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are rightly receiving considerable interest for many real-world applications, from in-body networks to satellite networks. Such a massive-scale system generates a considerable amount of traffic data, making IoT systems a distributed data source generator. For many reasons, such as the functionality of IoT applications and Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning, classifying these traffic data is of high importance. In the last few years, widespread interest has been expressed in applying Machine Learning (ML)-based techniques for Network Traffic Classification (NTC) tasks. However, the traditional centralized learning-based traffic classifiers pose serious challenges, especially in IoT networks. The centralized ML techniques call for collecting a large amount of data from various IoT devices, which in turn introduces data governance and privacy challenges. Furthermore, in the centralized ML, training data need to be transferred to the Cloud, which increases communication cost and latency. To address these problems, we propose Federated Learning (FL) Internet of Things (IoT) Traffic Classifier (FLITC)-a Federated Learning (FL)-based IoT traffic classification method which is based on the Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) neural network and holds the local data unimpaired on IoT devices by sending only the learned parameters to the aggregation server. Our experimental results show that the FLITC beats centralized learning in preserving the privacy of sensitive data and offers a better degree of accuracy at the cost of a longer training time.