Structured Optical Receivers for Efficient Deep-Space Communication

TL;DR

This paper proposes structured optical receiver designs that improve deep-space communication efficiency by concentrating photon energy into single temporal bins, reducing power requirements and enabling scalable, passive or active architectures.

Contribution

It introduces novel scalable architectures for structured optical receivers, including active polarization switching and passive optical element designs, for efficient photon-starved deep-space optical communication.

Findings

Active polarization switching maps Hadamard codewords to PPM.

Passive optical elements convert phase-polarization patterns into single pulses.

The designs enable distributed optical power with guard-time considerations.

Abstract

We discuss conceptual designs for structured optical receivers that can alleviate the requirement for high peak-to-average power ratio in photon-starved optical communication. The basic idea is to transmit sequences of suitably modulated coherent light pulses whose energy can be concentrated in a single temporal bin on the receiver side through optical interference. Two examples of scalable architectures for structured receivers are presented. The first one, based on active polarization switching, maps Hadamard codewords composed from the binary phase shift keying (BPSK) constellation onto the standard pulse position modulation (PPM) format. The second receiver, using solely passive optical elements, converts phase-polarization patterns of coherent light pulses into a single pulse preserving a synchronized time of arrival. Such a conversion enables implementation of a communication protocol equivalent to the PPM scheme but with distributed optical power provided that the intersymbol guard-time exceeds the pattern length.