Assessment of optical feeder links in lab environment and preliminary field trial evaluation presented at ICSO 2022

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Anaelle Maho (TAS) presenting at ICSO 2022

Anaelle Maho (TAS-F) presented the talk titled: “Experimental assessment of various optical communication chains for high-capacity optical feeder links” at 2022 International Conference on Space Optics (ICSO) in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Paper abstract:

Optical feeder links (OFL) are expected to become part of future Very High Throughput Satellite (VHTS) systems in response to the growing demand for higher capacity and lower costs. H2020 VERTIGO (Very High Throughput Satellite Ground Optical Link) project was set to prove key optical communication technologies and to address: 1) Throughput increase with high spectral and power efficiencies. 2) Higher optical power generation and delivery. 3) Atmospheric turbulence mitigation by optical and digital processing. Transmit and receive optical communication models were developed in rack units for assessing, in laboratory and outdoor trials, their intrinsic performance, robustness against atmospheric turbulence and compatibility with other technologies. The models for 25 Gbps OOK/DPSK and RF analog modulation with optically pre-amplified direct or differential detection are reported with the achieved performance. An atmospheric channel emulator fed with time series established by simulations was used to mimic the propagation losses and fading of the optical signal coupled into the receiver. Both the downlink and uplink under weak or strong turbulence were emulated. For digital transmission experiments, the performance metrics include BER curves, detection sensitivity and power penalty. State-of-the-art sensitivities were achieved especially under 25 Gbps DPSK. For RF analog transmission, the performance metrics were constellation diagrams and Error Vector Magnitude (EVM) measured for various modulations from QPSK to 64-QAM. Are reported the results of optical transmission experiments first performed in the laboratory under static and dynamic propagation channels, then in the outdoor trial successfully carried out in July between Jungfraujoch and Zimmerwald in Switzerland.

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