Adaptive Decentralized Federated Learning in LEO Satellite Networks

In Federated Learning (FL) for the low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks with parameters aggregated by a ground station, the communication overhead is a substantial concern. To circumvent this limitation and alleviate the latency within the FL for the satellite-ground communication, Decentralized Federated Learning (DFL) has appeared as an effective solution. However, considering the heterogeneity of satellites, the problem on how to efficiently leverage the limited resources available to enhance the model performance of DFL has drawn little attention, which motivates this work. Specifically, the proposed solution involves optimizing the number of local training rounds across diverse satellites with varying resource budgets to enhance the DFL performance by utilizing the resource more efficiently. Simulation results show that, the proposed scheme achieves a much better performance than the conventional schemes with fixed rounds of local training.