Federated Learning and Blockchain Supported Smart Networking in Beyond 5G (B5G) Wireless Communication

In recent years, Blockchain and Federated Learning (FL) are both making great technological advances independently. Blockchain provides a distributed and secure decentralized technique to process and authenticate transactions. On the other hand, FL enables end-devices to collaboratively train and update a mutual machine learning model while preserving the privacy of their data-sets. Both technologies are known to have several desirable advantages for today’s needs in terms of security and privacy. Moreover, when blockchain and FL technologies are enabled in B5G and 6G, security and privacy are preserved with full connectivity and distributivity. As both blockchain and FL advance further, the research focus is turning to integrate and unify the technologies to produce novel and smart networking services and applications. Currently, for large-scale advanced services and applications, the proposed solutions are far from practical. There are still many unresolved technical challenges in having systems that are scalable, and robust, and able to handle exponentially growing data.

Both blockchain and FL, supported by next-generation networking (NGN) technologies, including Beyond 5G and 6G, have the potential to address smart networking services and applications’ shortcomings by providing power computing processing and handling massive volumes of generated data. The benefits of synergizing these two technologies with NGN will without doubt provide a revolutionized approach towards widespread smart networking services and applications. Smart healthcare, Internet of Things, intelligent and industrial automation (industry 4.0), cyber-physical sensory systems, and smart and critical infrastructures, energy trading, smart shopping, smart banking, and efficient manufacturing procedures are examples of use cases that may receive impressive benefits from integrating these technologies. As such, this special issue aims to explore recent advances and disseminate state-of-the-art research on blockchain-based solutions and FL services and applications focused on Computer Networking issues.

Topics of Interest

Researchers, developers, and industry experts are welcome to contribute to one of the followings topics or slightly similar ones:

● Integration of Blockchain and FL in Beyond 5G/6G Network Architectures

● FL for large-scale Internet of Things

● FL in vehicular networks

● Blockchain with lightweight computation

● Blockchain-based service and applications for vehicular clouds

● FL for future internet architectures

● Scalable Blockchain for intelligent networking services

● Application of FL in large-scale intelligent networking services

● Blockchain for emerging networks

● Byzantine-tolerant FL

● Churn-tolerant FL

● FL for NGN and 6G

● FL for IoT healthcare systems

Submission Guidelines:

Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics of the Special Issue and the journal theme. All submitted papers will be evaluated on the basis of relevance, the significance of contribution, technical quality, and quality of presentation. Manuscripts need to be prepared according to Guide for Authors as published in the Computer Networks Journal at https://www.elsevier.com/journals/computer-networks/1389-1286/guide-for-authors. We invite the prospective authors to submit their manuscript, via the online submission system on the main journal page. Please make sure you mention in your cover letter that you are submitting to this special issue. The timetable is as follows:

● Manuscript Submission Deadline: 15 April 2021

● Initial Decision Date: 15 June 2021

● Revised Manuscript Due: 15 July 2021

● Final Decision Date: 15 August 2021

● Final Manuscript Due: 30 October 2021

Guest Editors

● Moayad Aloqaily, xAnalytics Inc., Ottawa, ON, Canada

● Yaser Jararweh, Duquesne University, USA

● Lewis Tseng, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA

● Giuseppe Piro, Politecnico di Bari, Italy