Clustering-Based Federated Learning for Enhancing Data Privacy in Internet of Vehicles

With the evolving complexity of connected vehicle features, the volume and diversity of data generated during driving continue to escalate. Enabling data sharing among interconnected vehicles holds promise for improving users' driving experiences and alleviating traffic congestion. Yet, the unintentional disclosure of users' private information through data sharing poses a risk, potentially compromising the interests of vehicle users and, in certain cases, endangering driving safety. Federated learning (FL) is a newly emerged distributed machine learning paradigm, which is expected to play a prominent role for privacy-preserving learning in autonomous vehicles. While FL holds significant potential to enhance the architecture of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the dynamic mobility of vehicles poses a considerable challenge to integrating FL with vehicular networks. In this paper, a novel clustered FL framework is proposed which is efficient for reducing communication and protecting data privacy. By assessing the similarity among feature vectors, vehicles are categorized into distinct clusters. An optimal vehicle is elected as the cluster head, which enhances the efficiency of personalized data processing and model training while reducing communication overhead. Simultaneously, the Local Differential Privacy (LDP) mechanism is incorporated during local training to safeguard vehicle privacy. The simulation results obtained from the 20newsgroups dataset and the MNIST dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, indicating that the proposed scheme can ensure data privacy effectively while reducing communication overhead.