Efficient Asynchronous Federated Evaluation with Strategy Similarity Awareness for Intent-Based Networking in Industrial Internet of Things

Intent-Based Networking (IBN) offers a promising paradigm for intelligent and automated network control in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments by translating high-level user intents into executable network strategies. However, frequent strategy deployment and rollback are impractical due to tightly coupled workflows and high downtime costs, while node heterogeneity and privacy constraints further complicate centralized strategy evaluation. To address these challenges, we propose a Federated Evaluation Enhanced Intent-Based Networking framework (FEIBN), which leverages large language models (LLMs) to translate user intents into structured strategy tuples and employs federated learning to support distributed strategy evaluation. To improve training efficiency and reduce communication overhead, we design a Strategy Similarity Aware Federated Learning mechanism (SSAFL), which selects nodes relevant to the task based on strategy similarity and resource status, and triggers asynchronous model uploads only when local updates are significant. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method improves model accuracy, accelerates convergence, and reduces communication cost compared with the baselines.