Federated Learning-Assisted Vehicular Edge Computing: Architecture and Research Directions

Recently, realizing machine learning (ML)-based technologies with the aid of mobile edge computing (MEC) in the vehicular network to establish an intelligent transportation system (ITS) has gained considerable interest. To fully utilize the data and onboard units of vehicles, it is possible to implement federated learning (FL), which can locally train the model and centrally aggregate the results, in the vehicular edge computing (VEC) system for a vision of connected and autonomous vehicles. In this article, we review and present the concept of FL and introduce a general architecture of FL-assisted VEC to advance development of FL in the vehicular network. The enabling technologies for designing such a system are discussed and, with a focus on the vehicle selection algorithm, performance evaluations are conducted. Recommendations on future research directions are highlighted as well.