Federated Learning in Vehicular Networks

Machine learning (ML) has already been adopted in vehicular networks for such applications as autonomous driving, road safety prediction and vehicular object detection, due to its model-free characteristic, allowing adaptive fast response. However, the training of the ML model brings significant overhead for the data transmission between the parameter server and the edge devices in the vehicles. Federated learning (FL) framework has been recently introduced as an efficient tool with the goal of reducing this transmission overhead while also achieving privacy through the transmission of only the model updates of the learnable parameters rather than the whole dataset. In this article, we investigate the usage of FL over ML in vehicular network applications to develop intelligent transportation systems. We provide a comprehensive analysis on the feasibility of FL for the ML based vehicular applications. Then, we identify the major challenges from both learning perspective, i.e., data labeling and model training, and from the communications point of view, i.e., data rate, reliability, transmission overhead/delay, privacy and resource management. Finally, we highlight related future research directions for FL in vehicular networks.Comment: 4 figures 7 pages. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Emerging privacy challenges and approaches in CAV systems

The growth of Internet-connected devices, Internet-enabled services and Internet of Things systems continues at a rapid pace, and their application to transport systems is heralded as game-changing. Numerous developing CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicle) functions, such as traffic planning, optimisation, management, safety-critical and cooperative autonomous driving applications, rely on data from various sources. The efficacy of these functions is highly dependent on the dimensionality, amount and accuracy of the data being shared. It holds, in general, that the greater the amount of data available, the greater the efficacy of the function. However, much of this data is privacy-sensitive, including personal, commercial and research data. Location data and its correlation with identity and temporal data can help infer other personal information, such as home/work locations, age, job, behavioural features, habits, social relationships. This work categorises the emerging privacy challenges and solutions for CAV systems and identifies the knowledge gap for future research, which will minimise and mitigate privacy concerns without hampering the efficacy of the functions