EBCFL: An Efficient BlockChain-Based Federated Learning Framework for Internet of Vehicles

Federated Learning (FL) can train a shared model while protecting vehicle data privacy, which has significant advantages in improving driving safety and efficiency. However, there are still many challenges in applying FL to Internet of Vehicles (IoV). First, the varying computing capabilities of moving vehicles result in slow convergence speed due to underperforming vehicles. Second, malicious vehicles may tamper with model parameters before uploading them to the central server, which is itself vulnerable to single-point failure. To solve the above challenges, we design an efficient and decentralized blockchain FL framework (Efficient BlockChain-based Federated Learning Framework, EBCFL). This framework effectively prevents possible malicious behaviors in the vehicular network nodes and improves the efficiency of FL through a well-designed security verification mechanism. The experimental results show that EBCFL outperforms other schemes in terms of average test accuracy and average total time cost, indicating that EBCFL significantly improves the learning efficiency while bearing an acceptable additional time cost for blockchain communication, demonstrating its strong ability to guard against malicious behaviours and ensure robustness.