Enhancing Air Quality Monitoring: A Brief Review of Federated Learning Advances

Monitoring air quality and environmental conditions is crucial for public health and effective urban planning. Current environmental monitoring approaches often rely on centralized data collection and processing, which pose significant privacy, security, and scalability challenges. Federated Learning (FL) offers a promising solution to these limitations by enabling collaborative model training across multiple devices without sharing raw data. This decentralized approach addresses privacy concerns while still leveraging distributed data sources. This paper provides a comprehensive review of FL applications in air quality and environmental monitoring, emphasizing its effectiveness in predicting pollutants and managing environmental data. However, the paper also identifies key limitations of FL when applied in this domain, including challenges such as communication overhead, infrastructure demands, generalizability issues, computational complexity, and security vulnerabilities. For instance, communication overhead, caused by the frequent exchange of model updates between local devices and central servers, is a notable challenge. To address this, future research should focus on optimizing communication protocols and reducing the frequency of updates to lessen the burden on network resources. Additionally, the paper suggests further research directions to refine FL frameworks and enhance their applicability in real-world environmental monitoring scenarios. By synthesizing findings from existing studies, this paper highlights the potential of FL to improve air quality management while maintaining data privacy and security, and it provides valuable insights for future developments in the field.