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Go to Editorial ManagerThe combination of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has quickly revolutionized the world of industry, and also brought with it some severe security risks. Despite its recent success, Deep learning (DL) can be a powerful method for Network Intrusion Detection systems (NIDS), but often the computational and memory requirements are too high for edge devices. In this paper, a collaborative optimization framework with lightweight deep-learning IDS models suitable for SDN-IoT environments is proposed. We formalize and test three collaborative compression schemes based on combining pruning, clustering, and quantization, yet maintaining the structural advantages of each stage: Sparsity-Preserving Quantization-Aware Training (PQAT), Cluster-Preserving Quantization-Aware Training (CQAT), and Sparsity-and-Cluster-Preserving Quantization-Aware Training (PCQAT). The three schemes are evaluated on four canonical architectures (LSTM, RNN, DNN and CNN) on the proposed SICA dataset with respect to DDoS, Probe and Brute-Force (BFA).The results show that aggressive single-stage compression such as clustering can shrink model size by up to 94%, but at the cost of predictive confidence; PCQAT, by contrast, acts as a stabilizer that recovers this lost confidence. In particular, CNN-PCQAT and DNN-PCQAT deliver the most favorable trade-off, sustaining high detection accuracy on all three attack classes with inference latency below 0.01 ms. The framework therefore offers a practical, deployment-oriented guideline for implementing real-time IDS on resource-constrained SDN-IoT edge devices.
With the rapid popularization of 5G edge communication systems, their decentralized architecture and the ultra-large attack surface brought by massive access devices have created severe network security challenges. Although current artificial intelligence-based intrusion detection systems and conventional federated learning schemes can achieve high intrusion detection accuracy, they universally suffer from two major limitations: excessive computational overhead and vulnerability to poisoning attacks, which make them unable to adapt to resource-constrained edge deployment environments. To address this issue, this paper proposes a lightweight anti-poisoning federated learning framework for low-latency secure 5G edge communications, with two core design elements: First, it integrates lightweight GRU/CNN models and a trust-aware aggregation mechanism to weaken the negative impact of malicious model updates; second, it introduces a deviation-based poisoning detection strategy to identify and filter adversarial updates during the federated learning process. We used the public CICIDS2017 dataset to complete tests in a simulated 5G edge environment equipped with 100 to 1000 edge devices, covering multiple scenarios including DDoS, MITM, and poisoning attacks. The results show that compared with existing similar schemes, the proposed framework reaches a maximum detection accuracy of 98.3\%, reduces communication latency by 30-35\%, cuts computational overhead by 40-60\%, and sees only a negligible drop in accuracy under poisoning attacks. It can support a wide range of real-time 5G edge applications such as intelligent transportation, smart cities, and the industrial Internet of Things.