Optical Communication in Space: Challenges and Mitigation Techniques

By Hemani Kaushal, Georges Kaddoum. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2017

1,526 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, free space optical (FSO) communication has gained significant importance owing to its unique features: large bandwidth, license free spectrum, high data rate, easy and quick deployability, less power, and low mass requirements. FSO communication uses optical carrier in the near infrared band to establish either terrestrial links within the Earth’s atmosphere or inter-satellite/deep space links or ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground links. It also finds its applications in remote sensing, radio astronomy, military, disaster recovery, last mile access, backhaul for wireless cellular networks, and many more. However, despite of great potential of FSO communication, its performance is limited by the adverse effects (viz., absorption, scattering, and turbulence) of the atmospheric channel. Out of these three effects, the atmospheric turbulence is a major challenge that may lead to serious degradation in the bit error rate performance of the system and make the communication link infeasible. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various challenges faced by FSO communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. It also provides details of various performance mitigation techniques in order to have high link availability and reliability. The first part of this paper will focus on various types of impairments that pose a serious challenge to the performance of optical communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. The latter part of this paper will provide the reader with an exhaustive review of various techniques both at physical layer as well as at the other layers (link, network, or transport layer) to combat the adverse effects of the atmosphere. It also uniquely presents a recently developed technique using orbital angular momentum for utilizing the high capacity advantage of optical carrier in case of space-based and near-Earth optical communication links. This survey provides the reader with comprehensive details on the use of space-based optical backhaul links in order to provide high capacity and low cost backhaul solutions.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4002e51f94fedc349365a0dc9f39cd0c8854438

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Satellite Communications in the New Space Era: A Survey and Future Challenges (2020, background): “The two main categories of propagation impairments are • Blockage Effects: Cloud coverage constitutes the predominant fading mechanism, resulting in the blockage of the link [161].”
A Vision and Framework for the High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) Networks of the Future (2020, methodology): “An excellent overview was provided in [40].”
Non-Terrestrial Networks in the 6G Era: Challenges and Opportunities (2019, methodology): “Moreover, cognitive spectrum Optical wireless technology can also be used in the feeder link to achieve aggregate capacity in the order of terabits-per-second [14].”
FSO-Based Vertical Backhaul/Fronthaul Framework for 5G+ Wireless Networks (2016, methodology): “Some examples of these techniques, which have been proposed for space FSO, are Optical PhaseLock loop (OPLL), Optical Injection Locking (OIL) technique, a combination of OPLL technique and OIL technique, and Optical Frequency Locked Loop (OPLL) [8].”
CubeSat Communications: Recent Advances and Future Challenges (2019, background): “Some statistical models for optical channels along with several approaches to coun-terbalance atmospheric effects have been reviewed in [63]; however, these models are still in the early research phase.”
The New Frontier in RAN Heterogeneity: Multi-Tier Drone-Cells (2016, background): “However, their reliability and coverage are limited, especially for inclement weather conditions [9, 10].”
A Key 6G Challenge and Opportunity—Connecting the Base of the Pyramid: A Survey on Rural Connectivity (2020, methodology): “However, FSO use is becoming increasingly popular for intersatellite communication in space, due to providing high bandwidth, having high directivity, and requiring less power and mass for the transceivers [246].”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs): A Survey on Civil Applications and Key Research Challenges (2018, positive): “For instance, Facebook will provide wireless connectivity via FSO links to remote areas by utilizing solar-powered high altitude UAVs [76], [268], [269].”
A Comparative Survey of Optical Wireless Technologies: Architectures and Applications (2018, background): “Transmission rates of 10 Gbps have already been implemented for long-distance communication [124].”