Semantic-Aware Federated Blockage Prediction (SFBP) in Vision-Aided Next-Generation Wireless Network

Predicting signal blockages in millimetre-wave and terahertz networks is essential for enabling proactive handover (PHO) and ensuring seamless connectivity. Existing approaches utilizing deep learning, multi-modal vision and wireless sensing data primarily depend on centralized model training. Although these techniques are effective, they come with high communication costs, inefficient bandwidth usage, and latency issues, which restrict their real-time applicability. This paper proposes a Semantic-Aware Federated Blockage Prediction (SFBP) framework, leveraging the lightweight computer vision technique MobileNetV3 for edge-based semantic extraction, lowering communication and computation costs. Furthermore, we introduce a Similarity-Driven Federated Averaging (SD-FedAVG) mechanism to enhance the robustness of the model aggregation process, effectively mitigating the impact of noisy updates and adversarial attacks. Our proposed SFBP framework achieves 97.1% blockage prediction accuracy, closely matching centralized learning methods, while reducing communication costs by 88.75% compared to centralized learning and by 57.87% compared to FL without semantic extraction. Moreover, on-device inference reduces the latency by 23% compared to centralized learning and 18% compared to FL without semantic extraction, improving real-time decision-making for PHO. Additionally, the SD-FedAVG mechanism improves prediction accuracy under noisy conditions, directly impacting the PHO by reducing the handover failure rate by 7%.