RAD-SFL: Resource-Aware Dynamic Split Federated Learning for Heterogeneous Edge Environments with Non-IID Data

Abstract

Edge computing enables distributed intelligence in resource-constrained IoT environments. However, traditional Federated Learning (FL) struggles with heterogeneous device capabilities, dynamic network conditions, and non-IID data distributions, resulting in straggler effects, slow convergence, and inefficient resource utilization. This paper proposes Resource-Aware Dynamic Split Federated Learning (RAD-SFL), a framework for efficient distributed training in heterogeneous edge environments. RAD-SFL introduces a dynamic model layer splitting mechanism that adaptively partitions model execution between client devices and edge servers based on real-time computation and communication conditions, and a group-and-reorder technique that organizes devices into balanced groups with similar data distributions to improve model convergence under non-IID settings. We validate RAD-SFL through experiments on widely adopted datasets using both a simulated environment and a real testbed with heterogeneous IoT devices. Results demonstrate that RAD-SFL reduces the training time by up to 66.4%, decreases device-side energy consumption by 52.5%, and improves global model accuracy by up to 30.5% compared to FL and SFL baselines.