A Privacy-Preserving Incentive Mechanism for Federated Cloud-Edge Learning

The federated learning scheme enhances the privacy preservation through avoiding the private data uploading in cloud-edge computing. However, the attacks against the uploaded model updates still cause private data leakage which demotivates the privacy-sensitive participating edge devices. Facing this issue, we aim to design a privacy-preserving incentive mechanism for the federated cloud-edge learning (PFCEL) system such that 1) the edge devices are motivated to actively contribute to the updated model uploading, 2) a trade-off between the private data leakage and the model accuracy is achieved. We formulate the incentive design problem as a three-layer Stackelberg game, where the server-device interaction is further formulated as a contract design problem. Extensive numerical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our designed mechanism in terms of privacy preservation and system utility.