Digital Twin-Enabled Dynamic Aggregation for Efficient Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw data, but it faces challenges due to client heterogeneity, leading to inefficiency and reduced accuracy. This paper proposes a digital twin (DT)-based dynamic FL aggregation method to address these issues. The framework integrates a DT layer on the server side to perform preaggregation evaluations, simulating various aggregation strategies to select the optimal approach before actual global aggregation. An adaptive clustering method based on K-means is employed to group clients with similar characteristics, and a hierarchical aggregation evaluation strategy is designed to optimize both intra-cluster and inter-cluster aggregation, with the goal of minimizing latency and energy consumption while maximizing model accuracy. Simulation results on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that the proposed method not only accelerates model convergence and improves accuracy but also significantly reduces training latency and energy consumption costs compared with baseline FL algorithms. This DT-assisted approach delivers a practical and effective optimization solution for federated learning deployment over large-scale heterogeneous IoT sensor networks.