FedCARE: Fuzzy-Supervised Federated Inference with Confidence Gating for Resilient IIoT Sensor Networks

Safety-critical Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensor networks deployed in disaster scenarios require intelligent routing mechanisms that prioritize mission-critical packets without relying on centralized coordination. Federated learning on resource-constrained edge nodes presents three primary challenges: the absence of an interpretable supervisory signal, the inability to act conservatively based on per-inference confidence, and vulnerability to partial node availability. The proposed FedCARE framework addresses these issues by employing a Mamdani Fuzzy Inference System to generate traceable criticality labels from multi-modal sensor telemetry, a dropout-aware aggregation protocol that normalizes over only reachable nodes, and a confidence-gated resolver that defers to symbolic fuzzy classification when model confidence is insufficient, otherwise applying an auditable maximization rule to prevent under-prioritization of safety-critical data. Evaluation on 50-, 100-, and 200-node Watts–Strogatz topologies under fault rates up to 50%, using the Edge-IIoTset and WUSTL-IIoT-2021 benchmarks, demonstrates 99.00% critical recall and up to 1.8× higher overall-packet delivery compared to RPL-RP under severe fault conditions. Routing improvements are primarily attributed to fuzzy criticality labeling and multi-path replication. These findings indicate that fuzzy-supervised federated inference offers a practical and interpretable solution for safety-critical IIoT routing, with an observed energy overhead of 7.8% per delivered packet.