Fed-NTP: A federated learning algorithm for network traffic prediction in VANET

During the last years, the volume of data produced in smart cities has been growing up, which can cause network traffic. Some of the challenges in an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) are predicting the network traffic with the highest accuracy, keeping the security of data and being less complex. Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms are advantageous solutions to predict, control and avoid network traffic. However, such algorithms brought some costs to the privacy field. Accordingly, besides having an accurate prediction, preserving the privacy of data is an important challenge that should be considered. To cope with this problem, we propose a Federated learning algorithm for Network Traffic Prediction (Fed-NTP) based on Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) algorithm to train the model locally, which can predict the network traffic flow accurately while preserving privacy. We implement the LSTM algorithm in a decentralized way by using the federate learning (FL) algorithm on the Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) dataset and predict network traffic based on the most influential features of network traffic flow in the road and network. Simulation results reveal that the proposed model besides preserving the privacy of data, takes an obvious advantage over other well-known AI algorithms in terms of errors in prediction and the highest R² − SCORE (0.975).