Evaluation of Error Correcting Code performances of a free space optical communication system between LEO satellite and Ground Station

摘要

Optical communication between LEO satellite and optical ground station creates the opportunity to highly increase the transmitted data rate. The propagation channel has specificities that imply the potential use of error correcting code (ECC) and interleaving at physical and higher layer. A physical layer simulator designed to investigate the performance of the combination of ECC and interleaving in presence of various channel scenarios and receiver architectures is presented here. The simulator emulates signal generation, propagation impairments by the use of dedicated optical attenuation time series provided by state of the art wave optics results and the effect of receiver front-ends with various detection methods. Mutual information (MI) is computed in order to approximate ECC performances. Various receiver architectures and channel scenarios were studied. Among others, direct coupling of the received signal into the photo-detector (PD) or the use of pre-amplified receiver with single mode fiber (SSMF) coupling and optical amplification prior to the detection were considered. Several receiver architectures were considered: the use of a wide field-of-view detector, SSMF coupling with a single tip/tilt correction or with higher order adaptive optics correction. Two modulations of OOK and DBPSK along with various detection methods were examined. The tuning of ECC parameters was studied through the computation of mutual information. Additionally, the two cases of physical and higher layer interleaving were implemented providing an excellent diversity to the channel seen by the codeword of ECC.