Neuromorphic Split Computing via Optical Inter-Satellite Links

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neuromorphic split-computing framework for optical inter-satellite links that significantly reduces energy and transmission load while maintaining high accuracy in remote sensing tasks.

Contribution

It proposes a novel lossless sparse event representation, hierarchical error protection, and end-to-end training techniques for efficient optical satellite communication using SNNs.

Findings

Achieves over 10x reduction in energy and transmission load.

Less than 1% accuracy loss in remote sensing inference.

Outperforms existing address-event-based split SNNs by 3.7x in efficiency.

Abstract

We present a neuromorphic split-computing framework for energy-efficient low-latency inference over optical inter-satellite links. The system partitions a spiking neural network (SNN) between edge and core nodes. To transmit sparse spiking features efficiently, we introduce a lossless channel-block-sparse event representation that exploits inter- and intra-channel sparsity. We employ hierarchical error protection using multi-level forward error correction and cyclic redundancy checks to ensure reliable communication without retransmission. The framework uses end-to-end training with sparsity and clustering regularizers, combined with channel-aware stochastic masking to optimize feature compression and channel robustness jointly. In a proof-of-concept implementation on remote sensing imagery, the framework achieves over $10 \times$ reduction in both computational energy and transmission load compared to conventional dense split systems, with less than 1% accuracy loss. The proposed approach also outperforms address-event-based split SNNs by $3.7 \times$ in transmission efficiency and shows superior resilience to optical pointing jitter.