Single laser based novel wavelength shift keying scheme for ground to satellite bidirectional links

Abstract Laser communication in space is gaining more recognition due to its ability to provide a much broader and unregulated data transmission capacity compared to traditional radio frequency systems, while also significantly decreasing the size, power requirements, and weight of the communication system. In this work, a novel technique for the generation of a wavelength shift keying (WSK) signal for the bidirectional transmission of 10 Gbps data between the ground station and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite is presented. Our proposed scheme requires a single laser source to transmit WSK signal, that generally requires two wavelength sources to transmit the binary data bits. Furthermore, the scheme allows us to remodulate the optical signal received at the LEO satellite for downlink signal transmission. Therefore, the requirement of a laser source at the LEO satellite is eliminated, achieving the much desirable goals of low power consumption, weight and cost. The free space optical (FSO) channel is modelled using the gamma-gamma channel model. The performance of the proposed link is also compared with a conventional On-Off keying (OOK) based modulation scheme by using bit-error-rate (BER) as the performance metric.