No abstract

Optical LEO downlinks from the Japanese OICETS to the optical ground station built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) near Munich have been performed. This was the first optical LEO downlink on European grounds. The ground station received a 50-Mbit/s OOK signal at 847 nm on its 40-cm Cassegrain telescope and sent two spatially displaced beacon beams towards OICETS. Five out of eight trials could be performed successfully while the other three were hindered by cloud blockage. A BER of 10-6 has been reached. The elevation angle above the horizon ranged between 2° and 45°. The Fried parameter and the scintillation were measured with instruments inside the ground station. The beacon power received by the LUCE Terminal onboard OICETS has also been recorded. This paper describes the setup of the experiment and highlights the results of the measurement trials.

No abstract

SUMMARYOptical backhaul downlinks from high-altitude platforms (HAPs) are investigated. An experiment demonstrated the advantages of optical links: a small and lightweight terminal with low power consumption was launched to the stratosphere and data transmitted down to a ground station at a rate of 1:25 Gbit=s: Owing to the chosen system parameters and the high budget margin, disturbing turbulence effects did not decrease the link performance.The scientific aspect of the experiment was to study turbulence effects in order to design future systems with higher transmission performance. On the day of the experiment, measured scintillation and wavefront distortions were minimal in the morning. The best atmospheric conditions were observed about 3 h after sunrise with a peak of the atmospheric coherence length r 0 at 16 cm: An r 0 of 4 cm was measured as the worst case before sunrise and later during the day. This trend could also be observed for power-ðs ; a lognormal intensity probability density function was measured.Apart from the robust intensity modulation scheme with direct detection which was used for the trial, future improved systems could benefit from a coherent transmission scheme. According to the r 0 measurements and further simulations on heterodyne efficiency it turned out that the aperture size can be decreased from 40 to 10 cm without any significant change in the link margin.Future stratospheric optical links between HAPs or links from platforms to satellites will not suffer from cloud blockage but it remains an issue for up/downlinks to a ground station. This can be mitigated by ground-station diversity. Four optical ground stations in the southern part of Europe can lead to an availability of over 98%. The separation distance of the ground stations is about 900 km with a negligible correlation of cloud cover. A change of wavelength from the employed 1.55 to a wavelength around 11-mm with minimum cloud attenuation would increase the link availability for thin clouds.

No abstract