Influence of reflector temperature gradients on bit-error rate in periscope laser communication systems in the presence of detector noise and platform vibrations

Abstract

We consider the influence of thermal deformations of elliptic reflectors in periscope laser communication terminals on the bit-error rate (BER) taking into account the satellite-platform vibrations and the detector noise. We study the relationship between the average BER and temperature gradients of elliptic reflectors in inter-satellite laser communication systems at different values of the light beam wavelength and truncation rate, and different vibration amplitudes. The average BER increases with increase in the vibration amplitude, and it is noteworthy that the average BER increases with increase in the beam truncation rate, which contradicts the result obtained in [1] without taking noise into account. We find that for some temperature gradients there is an optimum communication wavelength that provides the minimum average BER. We use the back-fixing method for fixing the elliptic reflectors, which has proved to be much less sensitive to temperature gradients compared to the traditional around-fixing method by a press board.