Fusion of Federated Learning and Industrial Internet of Things: A survey

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) lays a new paradigm for the concept of Industry 4.0 and paves an insight for new industrial era. Nowadays smart machines and smart factories use machine learning/deep learning based models for incurring intelligence. However, storing and communicating the data to the cloud and end device leads to issues in preserving privacy. In order to address this issue, Federated Learning (FL) technology is implemented in IIoT by the researchers nowadays to provide safe, accurate, robust and unbiased models. Integrating FL in IIoT ensures that no local sensitive data is exchanged, as the distribution of learning models over the edge devices has become more common with FL. Therefore, only the encrypted notifications and parameters are communicated to the central server. In this paper, we provide a thorough overview on integrating FL with IIoT in terms of privacy, resource and data management. The survey starts by articulating IIoT characteristics and fundamentals of distributed machine learning and FL. The motivation behind integrating IIoT and FL for achieving data privacy preservation and on-device learning are summarized. Then we discuss the potential of using machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and blockchain techniques for FL in secure IIoT. Further we analyze and summarize several ways to handle the heterogeneous and huge data. Comprehensive background on data and resource management are then presented, followed by applications of IIoT with FL in automotive, robotics, agriculture, energy, and healthcare industries. Finally, we shed light on challenges, some possible solutions and potential directions for future research.