Communication-Efficient Federated Learning for Anomaly Detection in Industrial Internet of Things

With the rapid development of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), various IoT devices and sensors generate massive industrial sensing data. Sensing big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better decisions and strategic industrial production by using advanced machine learning technologies. However, vulnerable IoT devices are easy to be compromised thus causing IoT devices failures (i.e., anomalies). The anomalies seriously affect the production of industrial products, thereby, it is increasingly important to accurately and timely detect anomalies. To this end, we first introduce a Federated Learning (FL) framework to enable decentralized edge devices to collaboratively train a Deep Anomaly Detection (DAD) model, which can improve its generalization ability. Second, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short Term Memory (CNN-LSTM) model to accurately detect anomalies. The CNN-LSTM model uses CNN units to capture fine-grained features and retains the advantages of LSTM unit in predicting time series data. Third, to achieve real-time and lightweight anomaly detection in the proposed framework, a gradient compression mechanism is applied to reduce communication costs and improve communication efficiency. Extensive experiment results based on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework and mechanism can accurately and timely detect anomalies, and also reduce about 50% communication overhead when compared with traditional schemes.