Absolute Power Vectors for the Optical LEO Uplink Channel

Abstract

In free-space optical (FSO) communications, modeling the power that is received at the optical detector is advantageous for addressing system improvements in the design of ground- and space-based optical terminals. The Institute of Communications and Navigation at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has previously developed a power vector generation tool that calculates numerical time series of received power considering the effects of the log-normal distributed atmospheric scintillation and the beta-distributed pointing error due to random jitter of an optical ground station. DLR’s tool can be used for different FSO link scenarios. However, the tool has mainly been applied to the satellite-to-ground (downlink) scenario for a given satellite elevation. In this work, DLR’s power vector generation tool is applied to generate time series of received power for the optical ground-to-satellite (uplink) scenario for a satellite pass of a LEO satellite at an ISS-like orbit with an elevation range of 0 to 90°. The procedure for obtaining the input variables for the power vector generation tool is described and the resulting time series of received power are presented. The results can be used to design fading mitigation techniques for the optical LEO uplink channel.