KEYWORDS: Transceivers, Receivers, Interfaces, Field programmable gate arrays, Satellites, Doppler effect, Design, Commercial off the shelf technology, Systems modeling, Error control coding
Optical satellite links provide increased throughput at a more competitive SWaP compared to radio frequency links. Due to the nature of the light interaction with atmosphere and the limited pointing accuracy, the propagated optical signal suffers from significant variation of the SNR. This causes error bursts in the received bit stream but can also lead to a temporary loss of synchronization causing further loss of data. Since bit rates in optical communications can reach multiple Gbps, millions of bits are affected by these error bursts and dropouts. Therefore, we propose an additional layer of protection, termed erasure coding, which is applied on top of the PHY layer of the communication system. This approach provides time diversity by long erasure code words, so that PHY interleaving can be abstained from. Therefore, optical transceiver and terminal architectures that were not specifically tailored to optical ground-to-satellite links can be reused with this layered approach. The erasure coding scheme corrects packet losses/erasures due to channel impairments, where the packet size and consequently the length of the code consisting of packets as codeword-symbols can be picked in a flexible way. Since only packet erasures need to be corrected, erasure codes show advantages compared to PHY coding schemes in terms of memory utilization and throughput. In this paper, the proposed erasure correction scheme is explained in detail and a performance analysis for typical scintillation channel models of earth-satellite laser communication links is presented. Furthermore, implementation aspects, as well as the encoding and decoding speed are discussed. In perspective, we aim at reaching a throughput in the order of 100 Gbps.
We consider high data rate free-space optical links between satellite and ground station, which are prone to strong variations of the received signal due to atmospheric turbulence. The high data rates towards hundreds of Gbit/s paired with channel coherence times of a few milliseconds pose a serious challenge for reliable transmission. On such non-ergodic channels, the use of appropriate diversity techniques combined with channel coding schemes is a must to ensure the required data rates. There are several ways to tackle the problem. A pragmatic approach is to rely on commercial transceivers from fiber optics, which are, however, not tailored to the free-space optical channel. Code rates are high and no suitable diversity schemes are foreseen. Such transceivers can be combined with a suitable retransmission scheme, which strongly reduces spectral efficiency. Another option is the addition of a complementary erasure coding scheme at a higher layer, which, due to its long codewords and additional redundancy, can correct longer sequences of errors. However, such a layered scheme yields a loss in achievable data rates. In this work, we rely on a theoretically optimal approach which is composed of a long physical layer interleaver as well as a long physical layer channel code. While the interleaver should provide the required time diversity, the selected strongly quantized Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code should correct the errors in the data. To support the required data rates, highly optimized hardware implementation becomes mandatory for both interleaver and decoder. To achieve high error correction performance and data rates towards hundreds of Gbit/s, a cross-layer design methodology is mandatory in which interleaver design, code, and decoding algorithms are jointly considered with its hardware implementation. We show that an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) implementation can reach the target data rates with a moderate backoff from theoretical limits.
After more than 3 years of operational experiences with the Transportable Adaptive Optical Ground Station (T-AOGS) it is not any more the question whether optical communication through atmosphere is possible for Geo to ground applications. It is important to understand the performance of optical communication under different atmospheric-conditions and which the key parameters are to improve simplicity, robustness and availability of optical bi-directional satellite to ground links (SGL). We report within this paper on the characterization of the atmospheric channel for ground to GEO optical communication without adaptive optics correction in the uplink. Besides the telemetry data of the space segment and the T-AOGS, also a special measurement campaign was carried out using the 1m telescope of the ESA-OGS in parallel. An outlook for further analysis and activities is given.
The paper reports on the deployment of the first commercial optical data relay system, the European Data Relay System (EDRS), the achieved performance so far, and the progress in the characterization of optical bi-directional space to ground links performed between the Laser Communication Terminal (LCT) on the Alphasat geostationary satellite and the transportable adaptive optics ground station (T-AOGS) currently co-located with the optical ground station from the European Space Agency (ESA) at Tenerife, Spain. Uplink results using homodyne binary phase shift keying at 1064 nm from the T-AOGS were examined. The performance of a packet erasure code according to the orange book CCSDS 131.5-O-1 optimized for the conditions of a laser uplink without adaptive optics correction of the phase front is analyzed.
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