Energy-Efficient On-Board Radio Resource Management for Satellite Communications via Neuromorphic Computing

TL;DR

This paper explores energy-efficient neuromorphic computing models, especially spiking neural networks on Intel Loihi 2, for on-board satellite communication resource management, demonstrating significant power savings and high accuracy.

Contribution

It introduces neuromorphic ML models, particularly SNNs on Loihi 2, for satellite radio resource management, with extensive experimental validation and comparison to traditional CNNs.

Findings

SNNs on Loihi 2 outperform CNNs in accuracy for relevant workloads.

SNNs reduce power consumption by over 100 times compared to CNNs.

Neuromorphic computing shows promise for efficient on-board SatCom operations.

Abstract

The latest satellite communication (SatCom) missions are characterized by a fully reconfigurable on-board software-defined payload, capable of adapting radio resources to the temporal and spatial variations of the system traffic. As pure optimization-based solutions have shown to be computationally tedious and to lack flexibility, machine learning (ML)-based methods have emerged as promising alternatives. We investigate the application of energy-efficient brain-inspired ML models for on-board radio resource management. Apart from software simulation, we report extensive experimental results leveraging the recently released Intel Loihi 2 chip. To benchmark the performance of the proposed model, we implement conventional convolutional neural networks (CNN) on a Xilinx Versal VCK5000, and provide a detailed comparison of accuracy, precision, recall, and energy efficiency for different traffic demands. Most notably, for relevant workloads, spiking neural networks (SNNs) implemented on Loihi 2 yield higher accuracy, while reducing power consumption by more than 100$\times$ as compared to the CNN-based reference platform. Our findings point to the significant potential of neuromorphic computing and SNNs in supporting on-board SatCom operations, paving the way for enhanced efficiency and sustainability in future SatCom systems.