H-FedSN: personalized sparse networks for efficient and accurate hierarchical federated learning for IoT applications

Abstract With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), federated learning (FL) has gained increasing attention for its privacy-preserving use of distributed data. However, conventional two-tier FL architectures are poorly suited to the hierarchical and heterogeneous nature of real-world IoT systems. Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) introduces multi-layer aggregation to better match IoT environments, but still suffers from communication inefficiencies and performance limitations caused by large data transfers, non-IID data distributions, and uneven device participation. These challenges hinder the realization of low-latency and high-accuracy training in practical IoT deployments. To address these limitations, we propose H-FedSN for practical IoT environments. H-FedSN leverages a binary mask mechanism with shared and personalized layers to reduce communication overhead by creating a sparse network without altering original weights. To tackle data heterogeneity and imbalanced device distribution, H-FedSN incorporates personalized layers for local data adaptation and employs Bayesian aggregation with cumulative Beta distribution updates at edge and cloud levels, effectively balancing contributions from diverse client groups. Experiments on three real-world IoT datasets and MNIST under non-IID conditions show that H-FedSN reduces communication costs by up to 477 times compared to baseline methods while maintaining high accuracy, making it well-suited for hierarchical FL in IoT deployments.