Description
The objective is to establish the best strategy or strategies for managing the handover of an optical link between two or more ground stations without loss of data.
Targeted Improvements: Validated site diversity concepts for optical earth-space links.
Site diversity is regularly employed in high radio frequency (e.g. Ka-band) satellite communication systems to maintain the earth-space linkavailability when individual ground stations are rendered inoperable by adverse propagation conditions (e.g. heavy rain). The site diversity system is engineered to support a seamless handover of communications between one earth station and another such that communications are uninterrupted.This activity will investigate the possibility of implementing an equivalent site diversity system forvarious optical earth-space links (eg LEO to ground, GEO to ground, HTS gateway feeds). The operational system shall be capable of autonomously tracking atmospheric conditions at each optical ground terminal site and performing an automatic (user transparent) seamless link handover such that optical link communication is maintained. Candidate strategies shall be identified, simulated and their performance assessed, taking into account mission constraints (e.g. on-board buffer size, latencies, etc.). Required technology developments shall be identified. The outcome may be different optimum strategies for different applications.
Tender Specifics