Privacy-Preserving Data-Driven Learning Models for Emerging Communication Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

With the proliferation of Beyond 5G (B5G) communication systems and heterogeneous networks, mobile broadband users are generating massive volumes of data that undergo fast processing and computing to obtain actionable insights. While analyzing this huge amount of data typically involves machine and deep learning-based data-driven Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, a key challenge arises in terms of providing privacy assurances for user-generated data. Even though data-driven techniques have been widely utilized for network traffic analysis and other network management tasks, researchers have also identified that applying AI techniques may often lead to severe privacy concerns. Therefore, the concept of privacy-preserving data-driven learning models has recently emerged as a hot area of research to facilitate model training on large-scale datasets while guaranteeing privacy along with the security of the data. In this paper, we first demonstrate the research gap in this domain, followed by a tutorial-oriented review of data-driven models, which can be potentially mapped to privacy-preserving techniques. Then, we provide preliminaries of a number of privacy-preserving techniques (e.g., differential privacy, functional encryption, Homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation, and federated learning) that can be potentially adopted for emerging communication networks. The provided preliminaries enable us to showcase the subset of data-driven privacy-preserving models, which are gaining traction in emerging communication network systems. We provide a number of relevant networking use cases, ranging from the B5G core and Radio Access Networks (RANs) to semantic communications, adopting privacy-preserving data-driven models. Based on the lessons learned from the pertinent use cases, we also identify several open research challenges and hint toward possible solutions.