TFL-DT: A Trust Evaluation Scheme for Federated Learning in Digital Twin for Mobile Networks

Due to the distributed collaboration and privacy protection features, federated learning is a promising technology to perform the model training in virtual twins of Digital Twin for Mobile Networks (DTMN). In order to enhance the reliability of the model, it is always expected that the users involved in federated learning have trustworthy behaviors. Yet, available trust evaluation schemes for federated learning have the problems of considering simplex evaluation factor and using coarse-grained trust calculation method. In this paper, we propose a trust evaluation scheme for federated learning in DTMN, which takes direct trust evidence and recommended trust information into account. A user behavior model is designed based on multiple attributes to depict users’ behavior in a fine-grained manner. Furthermore, the trust calculation methods for local trust value and recommended trust value of a user are proposed using the data of user behavior model as trust evidence. Several experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. The results show that the proposed method is able to evaluate the trust levels of users with different behavior patterns accurately. Moreover, it performs better in resisting attacks from users that alternately execute good and bad behaviors compared with state-of-the-art scheme.