PAGE CONTENTS
Objectives
The design and demonstration of link protection and restoration protocols, suitable for enhancing the reliability of optical feeder link systems. The solution shall be commercially competitive compared to radio frequency (RF) feeder systems for low Earth orbit satellite constellations, and result in similar or better performance with respect to key system parameters like latency, jitter or throughput.
Challenges
Reliable connectivity to a LEO constellation using optical feeders faces major challenges:
- Short contact times require a large, spatially dispersed network to ensure availability.
- Cloud cover and atmospheric turbulence induced outages decrease the planning reliability of these links.
- The solution needs to commercially competitive at very high data rates (>=100Gbit/s), otherwise RF solutions prevail.
System Architecture
The system architecture will become available after the conclusion of system trades.
Plan
The project is split into two stages:
- Analysis and evaluation of existing methods, along with the assessment of feasibility for implementation into the emulator.
- Implementation, performance benchmarking, and result analysis.
Current Status
The project has started and completed reviewing literature and assessing state-of-the-art.
