Alignment Performance of FSOC in Stratosphere and to the Ground Station

TL;DR

This paper investigates the impact of vibrations on the alignment performance of free-space optical communication systems on airborne platforms in the stratosphere, addressing a key challenge in ensuring reliable high-data-rate links.

Contribution

It introduces simple vibration models and evaluates their effects on FSOC system alignment, providing insights for improving PAT capabilities in airborne optical communication.

Findings

Vibrations significantly affect FSOC alignment performance.

Simple vibration models can predict alignment degradation.

Results inform design improvements for airborne FSOC systems.

Abstract

Airborne platforms, such as drones, balloons, and aerostats, have recently gained considerable interest in the communication sector. Free-space optical communication (FSOC) systems can deliver information wirelessly at high data rates (above 1 Gbps) using compact and lightweight optical terminals. Thus, airborne FSOC systems have been a recent subject of interest and activity, including emerging projects such as Google Loon and Facebook Aquila. One of major technical challenges of FSOC system is the stringent requirement of pointing, acquisition, and tracking (PAT) capability to ensure the reliable transmission between the transmitter and receiver, due to narrow beam width and movement of airborne platforms. By identifying and validating improvement techniques dealing with this issue, we developed simple models of propeller and wind induced vibrations and investigated the effect of those vibrations on the performance of FSOC systems operating in the stratosphere.