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.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.