Optical space communications

摘要

Optical space communications is on the verge of becoming anreality. It will be a key building block for wide-area space datannetworks of the future. We discuss the critical technology andnarchitecture issues to be addressed for the realization of thesensystems, and present examples of high level designs. Designnmethodologies treating these as complex engineering systems, and thentechnique to breakdown the systems into interacting but logicallynseparate subsystems for design and analysis, are suggested. Fundamentalnlimits of performance and avenues for promising future research andndevelopment are given