Accelerating Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning with Clustered Clients

With the rapid development of big data, Federated learning (FL) has found numerous applications, enabling machine learning (ML) on edge devices while preserving privacy. However, FL still faces crucial challenges, such as single point of failure and poisoning attacks, which motivate the integration of blockchain-enabled FL (BeFL). Beyond that, the efficiency issue still limits the further application of BeFL. To address these issues, we propose a novel decentralized framework: Accelerating Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning with Clustered Clients (ABFLCC), who utilize actual training time for clustering clients to achieve hierarchical FL and solve the single point of failure problem through blockchain. Additionally, the framework clusters edge devices considering their actual training times, which allows for synchronous FL within clusters and asynchronous FL across clusters simultaneously. This approach guarantees that devices with a similar training time have a consistent global model version, improving the stability of the converging process, while the asynchronous learning between clusters enhances the efficiency of convergence. The proposed framework is evaluated through simulations on three real-world public datasets, demonstrating a training efficiency improvement of 30% to 70% in terms of convergence time compared to existing BeFL systems.