Incremental federated learning for traffic flow classification in heterogeneous data scenarios

Abstract This paper explores the comparative analysis of federated learning (FL) and centralized learning (CL) models in the context of multi-class traffic flow classification for network applications, a timely study in the context of increasing privacy preservation concerns. Unlike existing literature that often omits detailed class-wise performance evaluation, and consistent data handling and feature selection approaches, our study rectifies these gaps by implementing a feed-forward neural network and assessing FL performance under both independent and identically distributed (IID) and non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) conditions, with a particular focus on incremental training. In our cross-silo experimental setup involving five clients per round, FL models exhibit notable adaptability. Under IID conditions, the accuracy of the FL model peaked at 96.65%, demonstrating its robustness. Moreover, despite the challenges presented by non-IID environments, our FL models demonstrated significant resilience, adapting incrementally over rounds to optimize performance; in most scenarios, our FL models performed comparably to the idealistic CL model regarding multiple well-established metrics. Through a comprehensive traffic flow classification use case, this work (i) contributes to a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of FL, offering valuable insights for the real-world deployment of FL, and (ii) provides a novel, large, carefully curated traffic flow dataset for the research community.