ORCA: Onboard Reflective Collaborative Agents for Reliable Task Offloading in LEO Satellite Networks

Overview & Synopsis

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites increasingly perform time-critical onboard processing, yet heterogeneous computing capabilities, rapidly changing inter-satellite links (ISLs) and uncertain neighbor behavior make decentralized task offloading difficult under partial observations. This paper presents ORCA, an architecture of Onboard Reflective Collaborative Agents for autonomous onboard task offloading. ORCA organizes offloading decisions into a four-Agent \emph{Perceive}$\rightarrow$\emph{Reason}$\rightarrow$ \emph{Act}$\rightarrow$\emph{Learn} loop. It aims to improve efficiency and reliability in dynamic, heterogeneous, and unreliable LEO satellite networks. The simulation results of a heterogeneous 60-satellite Walker-delta constellation demonstrates that ORCA delivers competitive system efficiency in cooperative settings while achieving superior task-success robustness and offloading reliability under previously unseen malicious node behavior, indicating that outcome-grounded reflection can improve the reliability of decentralized onboard offloading without centralized runtime coordination.