Federated In-Network Machine Learning for Privacy-Preserving IoT Traffic Analysis

The expanding use of Internet-of-Things (IoT) has driven machine learning (ML)-based traffic analysis. 5G networks’ standards, requiring low-latency communications for time-critical services, pose new challenges to traffic analysis. They necessitate fast analysis and response, preventing service disruption or security impact on network infrastructure. Distributed intelligence on IoT edge has been studied to analyze traffic, but introduces delays and raises privacy concerns. Federated learning can address privacy concerns, but does not meet latency requirements. In this article, we propose FLIP4: an efficient federated learning-based framework for in-network traffic analysis. Our solution introduces a lightweight federated tree-based model, offloaded and running within network devices. FLIP4 consumes less resources than previous solutions and reduces communication overheads, making it well-suited for IoT edge traffic analysis. It ensures prompt mitigation and minimal impact on services in the presence of false alerts using two approaches (metering and dropping), thereby balancing learning accuracy and privacy requirements.