High altitude clouds impacts on the design of optical feeder link and optical ground station network for future broadband satellite services

Abstract

Optical links at 1.55μm are envisaged to cope with the increasing capacity demand from geostationary telecom satellite operators without the need of Radio Frequency (RF) coordination. Due to clouds blockages, site diversity techniques based on a network of Optical Ground Stations (OGS) are necessary to reach the commonly required link availability (e.g. 99.9% over the year). Evaluation of the N Optical Ground Station Network (N-OGSN) availability is based on Clouds Masks (CMs) and depends on the clouds attenuation taken in the optical communication budget link. In particular, low attenuation of high semitransparent clouds (i.e. cirrus) could be incorporated into the budget link at the price of larger or more powerful optical terminals. In this paper, we present a method for the calibration of the attenuation at 1.55 μm of high semitransparent clouds. We perform OGS localization optimization in Europe and we find that the incorporation of thin cirrus attenuation in the budget link reduces by 20% the number of handover (i.e. switches OGS) and the handover rate. It is also shown that the minimum number of station required in Europe to reach 99.9% link availability is 10 to 11. When the zone of research is enlarged the Africa, this number is reduced to 3 to 4.