FLEXE: Investigating Federated Learning in Connected Autonomous Vehicle Simulations

Due to the increased computational capacity of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) and worries about transferring private information, it is becoming more and more appealing to store data locally and move network computing to the edge. This trend also extends to Machine Learning (ML) where Federated learning (FL) has emerged as an attractive solution for preserving privacy. Today, to evaluate the implemented vehicular FL mechanisms for ML training, researchers often disregard the impact of CAV mobility, network topology dynamics, or communication patterns, all of which have a large impact on the final system performance. To address this, this work presents FLEXE, an Open Source extension to Veins that offers researchers a simulation environment to run FL experiments in realistic scenarios. FLEXE combines the popular Veins framework with the OpenCV library. Using the example of traffic sign recognition, we demonstrate how FLEXE can support investigations of FL techniques in a vehicular environment.