On Demand Fog Federations for Horizontal Federated Learning in IoV

Federated learning using fog computing can suffer from the dynamic behavior of some of the participants in its training process, especially in Internet-of-Vehicles where vehicles are the targeted participants. For instance, the fog might not be able to cope with the vehicles’ demands in some areas due to resource shortages when the vehicles gather for events, or due to traffic congestion. Moreover, the vehicles are exposed to unintentionally leaving the fog coverage area which can result in the task being dropped as the communications between the server and the vehicles weaken. The aforementioned limitations can affect the federated learning model accuracy for critical applications, such as autonomous driving, where the model inference could influence road safety. Recent works in the literature have addressed some of these problems through active sampling techniques, however, they suffer from many complications in terms of stability, scalability, and efficiency of managing the available resources. To address these limitations, we propose a horizontal-based federated learning architecture, empowered by fog federations, devised for the mobile environment. In our architecture, fog computing providers form stable fog federations using a Hedonic game-theoretical model to expand their geographical footprints. Hence, providers belonging to the same federations can migrate services upon demand in order to cope with the federated learning requirements in an adaptive fashion. We conduct the experiments using a road traffic signs dataset modeled with intermodal traffic systems. The simulation results show that the proposed model can achieve better accuracy and quality of service than other models presented in the literature.