Evaluation of Communication Performance For Adaptive Optics Corrected Geo-To-Ground Laser Links

Abstract

For future GEO to ground communications link, very high throughput might be achievable at a reasonable cost assuming the use of existing single mode components developed for fiber technologies (optical detectors and amplifiers, MUX/DEMUX...). The influence of atmospheric turbulence degrades the injection efficiency of the incoming wave into single mode components. This leads to signal fading and channel impairments. Several mitigation strategies are considered to prevent them. The use of adaptive optics should contribute to reduce substantially the criticality of the fading at the expense of potentially complex and expensive systems if very high stability of the injection is requested. The use of appropriate interleaving can help to relax the specifications and cost of AO systems but could lead to unmanageable buffer size. Thus the specification of AO correction and interleavers should be addressed jointly. An analytical model to evaluate the channel capacity in terms of outage probability and packet error rate has been developed that jointly takes into account partial correction by AO and channel interleaving. The influence of partial correction is inferred from statistical and temporal properties of the corrected wavefront that are explicitly related to injection efficiency. Among others an analytical evaluation of the mean fading time is provided. Interleaving is taken into account with a block fading model. This model is presented here and confronted to numerical simulations for two distinct correction cases. The accuracy of the model is discussed. The interdependence of AO correction with interleaving is investigated.