Toward On-Device Federated Learning: A Direct Acyclic Graph-Based Blockchain Approach

Due to the distributed characteristics of federated learning (FL), the vulnerability of the global model and the coordination of devices are the main obstacle. As a promising solution of decentralization, scalability, and security, leveraging the blockchain in FL has attracted much attention in recent years. However, the traditional consensus mechanisms designed for blockchain-like proof of work (PoW) would cause extreme resource consumption, which reduces the efficiency of FL greatly, especially when the participating devices are wireless and resource-limited. In order to address device asynchrony and anomaly detection in FL while avoiding the extra resource consumption caused by blockchain, this article introduces a framework for empowering FL using direct acyclic graph (DAG)-based blockchain systematically (DAG-FL). Accordingly, DAG-FL is first introduced from a three-layer architecture in detail, and then, two algorithms DAG-FL Controlling and DAG-FL Updating are designed running on different nodes to elaborate the operation of the DAG-FL consensus mechanism. After that, a Poisson process model is formulated to discuss that how to set deployment parameters to maintain DAG-FL stably in different FL tasks. The extensive simulations and experiments show that DAG-FL can achieve better performance in terms of training efficiency and model accuracy compared with the typical existing on-device FL systems as the benchmarks.

Automated summary

This article introduces a framework called DAG-FL, which leverages a directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based blockchain to enhance federated learning (FL). DAG-FL addresses the challenges of device asynchrony and anomaly detection in FL, while avoiding the extra resource consumption caused by traditional blockchain consensus mechanisms. Extensive simulations and experiments demonstrate that DAG-FL achieves better performance in terms of training efficiency and model accuracy compared to existing on-device FL systems.