Blockchain Assisted Trust Management for Data-Parallel Distributed Learning

Machine learning models can support decision-making in mobile terminals (MTs) deployments, but their training generally requires massive datasets and abundant computation resources. This is challenging in practice due to the resource constraints of many MTs. To address this issue, data-parallel distributed learning can be conducted by offloading computation tasks from MTs to the edge-layer nodes. To facilitate the establishment of trust, one can leverage trust management, say to use trust values derived from local model quality and evaluations by other nodes as access criteria. Nonetheless, security and performance considerations remain unsolved. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-assisted dynamic trust management scheme for distributed learning, which comprises nodes attributes registration, trust calculation, information saving, and block writing. The proof of stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is leveraged to enable efficient consensus among the nodes using trust values as stakes. The incentive mechanism and corresponding dynamic optimization are then proposed to further improve system performance and security. The reinforcement-learning approach is leveraged to provide the optimal strategy for nodes' local iterations and selection. Simulations and security analysis demonstrate that our proposed scheme can achieve an optimal trade-off between efficiency and quality of distributed learning while maintaining system security. © 2024 IEEE.