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arXiv · 2608.09687

FedOrbit: Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning for Non-IID LEO Satellite Constellations

Abstract

Federated learning (FL) in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations is affected by non-IID data and irregular ground-station visibility, both driven by orbital geometry. Global aggregation performs poorly when orbit-level class distributions are disjoint, while strong personalisation can be excessive when these distributions overlap. We present FedOrbit, which combines continuous orbit-level training over inter-satellite links, class-aware hierarchical aggregation, quality-weighted feature aggregation with return-rate dampening, and adaptive feature decomposition based on inter-orbit class similarity. Across three remote-sensing benchmarks and two non-IID partitions, FedOrbit achieves the highest accuracy in five of six settings and is within $0.9$ percentage points of the best result in the sixth. The gains over the strongest baseline reach $16.1$ percentage points under Dirichlet partitioning and $8.6$ under pathological partitioning, with the smallest per-orbit accuracy spread in five of six settings.

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Satwat Bashir, Tasos Dagiuklas, Muddesar Iqbal. 2026-08-10. FedOrbit: Adaptive Personalized Federated Learning for Non-IID LEO Satellite Constellations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.09687

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