Countries across the globe have been pushing strict regulations on the protection of personal or private data collected. The traditional centralized machine learning method, where data is collected from end-users or IoT devices, so that it can discover insights behind real-world data, may not be feasible for many data-driven industry applications in light of such regulations. A new machine learning method, coined by Google as Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple participants to train a machine learning model collectively without directly exchanging data. However, recent studies have shown that there is still a possibility to exploit the shared models to extract personal or confidential data. In this paper, we propose to adopt Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to achieve privacy-preserving model aggregation for FL. The MPC-enabled model aggregation in a peer-to-peer manner incurs high communication overhead with low scalability. To address this problem, the authors proposed to develop a two-phase mechanism by 1) electing a small committee and 2) providing MPC-enabled model aggregation service to a larger number of participants through the committee. The MPC-enabled FL framework has been integrated in an IoT platform for smart manufacturing. It enables a set of companies to train high quality models collectively by leveraging their complementary data-sets on their own premises, without compromising privacy, model accuracy vis-a`-vis traditional machine learning methods and execution efficiency in terms of communication cost and execution time.

Cooperative packet delivery can improve the data delivery performance in wireless networks by exploiting the mobility of the nodes, especially in networks with intermittent connectivity, high delay and error rates such as wireless mobile delay-tolerant networks (DTNs). For such a network, we study the problem of rational coalition formation among mobile nodes to cooperatively deliver packets to other mobile nodes in a coalition. Such coalitions are formed by mobile nodes which can be either well behaved or misbehaving in the sense that the well-behaved nodes always help each other for packet delivery, while the misbehaving nodes act selfishly and may not help the other nodes. A Bayesian coalitional game model is developed to analyze the behavior of mobile nodes in coalition formation in presence of this uncertainty of node behavior (i.e., type). Given the beliefs about the other mobile nodes' types, each mobile node makes a decision to form a coalition, and thus the coalitions in the network vary dynamically. A solution concept called Nash-stability is considered to find a stable coalitional structure in this coalitional game with incomplete information. We present a distributed algorithm and a discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) model to find the Nash-stable coalitional structures. We also consider another solution concept, namely, the Bayesian core, which guarantees that no mobile node has an incentive to leave the grand coalition. The Bayesian game model is extended to a dynamic game model for which we propose a method for each mobile node to update its beliefs about other mobile nodes' types when the coalitional game is played repeatedly. The performance evaluation results show that, for this dynamic Bayesian coalitional game, a Nash-stable coalitional structure is obtained in each subgame. Also, the actual payoff of each mobile node is close to that when all the information is completely known. In addition, the payoffs of the mobile nodes will be at least as high as those when they act alone (i.e., the mobile nodes do not form coalitions).

We consider the problem of cooperative packet delivery to mobile nodes in a hybrid wireless mobile network, where both infrastructure-based and infrastructure-less (i.e., ad hoc mode or peer-to-peer mode) communications are used. We propose a solution based on a coalition formation among mobile nodes to cooperatively deliver packets among these mobile nodes in the same coalition. A coalitional game is developed to analyze the behavior of the rational mobile nodes for cooperative packet delivery. A group of mobile nodes makes a decision to join or to leave a coalition based on their individual payoffs. The individual payoff of each mobile node is a function of the average delivery delay for packets transmitted to the mobile node from a base station and the cost incurred by this mobile node for relaying packets to other mobile nodes. To find the payoff of each mobile node, a Markov chain model is formulated and the expected cost and packet delivery delay are obtained when the mobile node is in a coalition. Since both the expected cost and packet delivery delay depend on the probability that each mobile node will help other mobile nodes in the same coalition to forward packets to the destination mobile node in the same coalition, a bargaining game is used to find the optimal helping probabilities. After the payoff of each mobile node is obtained, we find the solutions of the coalitional game which are the stable coalitions. A distributed algorithm is presented to obtain the stable coalitions and a Markov-chain-based analysis is used to evaluate the stable coalitional structures obtained from the distributed algorithm. Performance evaluation results show that when the stable coalitions are formed, the mobile nodes achieve a nonzero payoff (i.e., utility is higher than the cost). With a coalition formation, the mobile nodes achieve higher payoff than that when each mobile node acts alone.