Federated Blockchain Learning at the Edge

Machine learning, particularly using neural networks, is now widely adopted in practice even with the IoT paradigm; however, training neural networks at the edge, on IoT devices, remains elusive, mainly due to computational requirements. Furthermore, effective training requires large quantities of data and privacy concerns restrict accessible data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method leveraging a blockchain and federated learning to train neural networks at the edge effectively bypassing these issues and providing additional benefits such as distributing training across multiple devices. Federated learning trains networks without storing any data and aggregates multiple networks, trained on unique data, forming a global network via a centralized server. By leveraging the decentralized nature of a blockchain, this centralized server is replaced by a P2P network, removing the need for a trusted centralized server and enabling the learning process to be distributed across participating devices. Our results show that networks trained in such a manner have negligible differences in accuracy compared to traditionally trained networks on IoT devices and are less prone to overfitting. We conclude that not only is this a viable alternative to traditional paradigms but is an improvement that contains a wealth of benefits in an ecosystem such as a hospital.