Blockchain-Enabled Variational Information Bottleneck for IoT Networks

In Internet of Things (IoT) networks, the amount of data sensed by user devices may be huge, resulting in the serious network congestion. To solve this problem, intelligent data compression is critical. The variational information bottleneck (VIB) approach, combined with machine learning, can be employed to train the encoder and decoder, so that the required transmission data size can be reduced significantly. However, VIB suffers from the computing burden and network insecurity. In this letter, we propose a blockchain-enabled VIB (BVIB) approach to relieve the computing burden while guaranteeing network security. Extensive simulations conducted by Python and C++ demonstrate that BVIB outperforms VIB by 36%, 22% and 57% in terms of time and CPU cycles cost, mutual information, and accuracy under attack, respectively.