Investigations of free space and deep space optical communication scenarios

Abstract The link performance of free space optical communications (FSOC) and deep (DSOC) are investigated by considering two scenarios in communications, for example, the downlink uplink between earth ground stations near geostationary (GEO) satellites, spacecraft with large distance 1 astronomical unit (AU) to earth. Generally a larger than 0.01 AU or approximately 1,500,000 km from Earth is considered as space. In these theoretical investigations, different realistic system parameters lasers, transmitters, receivers, avalanche photodiodes (APDs), telescopes, atmospheric disturbances like scintillation absorption considered. simulation results compared existing project data valuable ESA experimental verify improve models. comparison this paper shows that models budget estimation feasible investigations FSOC DSOC, can be used investigate improved design implementation DSOC projects planned long-term medium-term missions.