Enabling federated learning of explainable AI models within beyond-5G/6G networks

The quest for trustworthiness in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly urgent, especially in the field of next-generation wireless networks. Future Beyond 5G (B5G)/6G networks will connect a huge amount of devices and will offer innovative services empowered with AI and Machine Learning tools. Nevertheless, private user data, which are essential for training such services, are not an asset that can be unrestrictedly shared over the network, mainly because of privacy concerns. To overcome this issue, Federated Learning (FL) has recently been proposed as a paradigm to enable collaborative model training among multiple parties, without any disclosure of private raw data. However, the initiative to natively integrate FL services into mobile networks is still far from being accomplished. In this paper we propose a novel FL-as-a-Service framework that provides the B5G/6G network with flexible mechanisms to allow end users to exploit FL services, and we describe its applicability to a Quality of Experience (QoE) forecasting service based on a vehicular networking use case. Specifically, we show how FL of eXplainable AI (XAI) models can be leveraged for the QoE forecasting task, and induces a benefit in terms of both accuracy, compared to local learning, and trustworthiness, thanks to the adoption of inherently interpretable models. Such considerations are supported by an extensive experimental analysis on a publicly available simulated dataset. Finally, we assessed how the learning process is affected by the system deployment and the performance of the underlying communication and computation infrastructure, through system-level simulations, which show the benefits of deploying the proposed framework in edge-based environments.