TL;DR
The Federated Green Anaconda Optimizer (FedGAO), an innovative FL framework inspired by the behavioral patterns of the Green Anaconda Optimizer (GAO), is proposed, demonstrating superior performance in terms of accuracy, convergence speed, and resource efficiency.
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices operating at the network edge has created unprecedented demand for distributed machine learning capable of functioning under severe resource constraints. Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving collaborative model training across distributed nodes; however, its application to energy-constrained edge environments remains insufficiently characterized at the system level, particularly with respect to reproducible evaluation of resource consumption and communication efficiency. In this paper, we present EcoFL (Energy-Conscious Federated Learning), a modular, energy-aware benchmarking and orchestration framework for systematic evaluation of lightweight machine learning models under emulated edge hardware constraints. Rather than proposing a new federated optimization algorithm, EcoFL extends a standard FedAvg-based training pipeline with three principal components: (i) an energy-aware communication scheduler that dynamically adapts aggregation rounds and client participation based on per-node resource availability; (ii) a comprehensive system-level profiling pipeline capturing CPU utilization, RAM consumption, inference latency, communication overhead, and estimated computational energy consumption per training round; and (iii) a reproducible benchmarking methodology enabling fair comparison of centralized, standard federated (FedAvg), and energy-aware federated configurations. We evaluate five lightweight model families—Logistic Regression, Random Forest, XGBoost, Multilayer Perceptron, and Isolation Forest—under emulated Raspberry Pi 4 hardware constraints using an anomaly detection task on synthetic IoT sensor telemetry (50,000 samples, 12 features, Dirichlet non-IID partitioning). Experimental results across five independent seeds show that, within the evaluated benchmark setting, EcoFL reduces estimated federated training energy by 79.9–92.9% (mean 84.4%) relative to standard FedAvg through adaptive round termination (4–7 rounds versus 20 fixed rounds), while showing no statistically significant F1-score degradation for four of the five evaluated model families under the tested seed regime. Notably, EcoFL achieves a higher F1-score than FedAvg for Random Forest (+0.052), which we attribute to reduced overfitting resulting from earlier convergence under non-IID data distributions. The full EcoFL framework is released as open-source software to promote reproducibility in energy-aware federated learning research and to facilitate systematic investigation of the trade-offs between predictive performance, resource utilization, and communication overhead in resource-constrained edge environments.
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.
Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling distributed intelligence in Internet of Things (IoT) environments while preserving data privacy and reducing the need for centralized data collection. However, the practical deployment of FL in IoT scenarios remains challenging due to heterogeneous data distributions, unreliable communication conditions, and the presence of faulty or malicious edge devices that can disrupt collaborative training. These limitations can significantly degrade convergence stability and predictive performance, particularly in resource-constrained and intermittently connected networks. This paper proposes a simulation-driven trust-aware federated learning framework for robust intelligent IoT networks. The proposed approach incorporates a dynamic trust-based aggregation mechanism that adaptively weights client contributions based on the consistency of their local model updates with the global model state. In addition, a controlled IoT-oriented federated simulation environment is developed to emulate heterogeneous edge conditions, including non-independent and identically distributed (non-IID) data partitioning, adversarial model manipulation, and intermittent client connectivity caused by communication dropouts. Extensive multi-seed experiments were conducted on the UCI Human Activity Recognition (UCI HAR) dataset and complemented with an auxiliary CIFAR-10 convolutional neural network (CNN) validation scenario. The evaluation considered multiple adversarial settings, including sign-flip, Gaussian-noise, scaling, and label-flip attacks, as well as communication-dropout probabilities up to 50%. In contrast with the initial FedAvg-only evaluation, the revised experimental analysis includes comparisons with representative robust aggregation baselines, namely Median, Trimmed Mean, Krum, Multi-Krum, and an auxiliary Bulyan configuration. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Trust-FedAvg framework substantially improves robustness over conventional FedAvg and remains competitive with established robust aggregation strategies, particularly under directional model-manipulation attacks and intermittent-connectivity conditions. Under a 20% sign-flip attack on UCI HAR, the proposed method achieved a final test accuracy of 86.2%, whereas conventional FedAvg degraded to approximately 44.7%. Furthermore, under combined adversarial and intermittent-connectivity conditions with 50% communication dropout, Trust-FedAvg maintained a final accuracy of 57.0%, compared with 21.3% for FedAvg, 24.8% for Median, and 14.6% for Trimmed Mean. The additional experiments also show that Trust-FedAvg is not universally superior across all perturbation types: under severe Gaussian-noise attacks, coordinate-wise Median and Multi-Krum provided stronger robustness in some settings. Overall, the results suggest that trust-aware aggregation can improve robustness against unreliable or malicious simulated clients while preserving a relatively simple aggregation procedure. Runtime measurements further indicate that the proposed method introduces only limited round-level overhead compared with FedAvg, while remaining simpler than more complex Byzantine-resilient alternatives. Further validation with real IoT deployments, additional sensor datasets, asynchronous communication models, energy profiling, and communication-overhead measurements is required to fully assess deployment feasibility in real IoT environments. The proposed framework provides a practical, extensible basis for the design and evaluation of resilient AI-enabled IoT networks operating under controlled but practically relevant edge-learning constraints.
Results demonstrate the practicality of integrating predictive intelligence and decentralized coordination for scalable and secure FL, and avoids overloading any single node and ensures fault-tolerant, adaptive selection through continuous monitoring and helper-assisted data gathering.
Federated learning (FL) enables distributed optimization and learning across decentralized edge devices while preserving data privacy, but its performance is fundamentally constrained by heterogeneous data distributions, limited communication resources, and energy availability. In practical wireless networks, mobile devices (MDs) often exhibit diverse data and learning objectives, naturally forming clusters of users with jointly trainable models. When devices rely on energy harvesting (EH), stochastic energy arrivals further complicate participation and scheduling under communication constraints. In this work, we study over-the-air (OTA) FL with EH MDs under heterogeneous data distributions, and investigate two closely related learning objectives within a unified framework: one aiming for a more representative global model by reducing data bias, and the other learning more personalized cluster-specific models by exploiting this bias. In the global training mode, cluster information guides energy- and diversity-aware scheduling, ensuring that the scheduled active users provide a more representative aggregate update. In the personalization mode, the same cluster structure defines cluster-level learning objectives and OTA recovery targets, enabling the parameter server to train multiple cluster-specific models through simultaneous transmissions over the wireless multiple-access channel. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed unified framework improves fairness or personalization, depending on the operating mode, while reducing communication overhead.