Federated graph learning via constructing and sharing feature spaces for cross-domain IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) collects large volumes of diverse data, with graph data as a critical component, and extensively utilizes Federated Graph Learning (FGL) to process this data while preserving data security. However, the graph data collected by different IoT institutions are relatively independent due to various factors (e.g., data collection methods, geographical locations), and data access is restricted to local environments due to privacy constraints, IoT institutions typically possess heterogeneous feature spaces. Aggregating under these conditions could potentially contaminate local graph representations. Unfortunately, most existing FGL methods tend to overlook this issue. To address this challenge, we propose Federated Graph Learning via Constructing and Sharing Features (FedCSF), a novel FGL framework designed to build a globally consistent feature space and share it among IoT institutions. To construct and extract the feature space, we employ an uniform feature initialization across IoT institutions and design an encoder to extract both global and local feature relationships, thereby facilitating effective collaboration across data from different IoT institutions. Furthermore, we introduce an independent adaptive aggregation strategy to eliminate the integration of harmful knowledge, ensuring that the contributions from each IoT institution are effectively integrated into the global model. We theoretically analyze the convergence of FedCSF. To validate the effectiveness of FedCSF, we conducted extensive experiments under various settings (i.e., cross-datasets, and cross-domains), demonstrating its significant advantages of FedCSF in terms of performance, convergence speed, and practical adaptability.