Designing high-speed GEO-to-Moon optical wireless communication links

Abstract

Moon exploration and colonization will strongly rely upon high-speed optical wireless communications over a huge distance (around 400,000 km). Here, we introduce a holistic model, including the propagation issues as well as the realistic communication limitations and the expected practical limitations. We focus on the communication issues in a link connecting a GEO satellite to a fixed Moon optical station: here, we consider the challenging 10 Gbit/s transmission rate, and we assume an optical pre-amplified receiver, which is today the only option for high speed; we then select three different modulation formats, with corresponding implementations and increasing complexity and performance. Under these assumptions, we estimate the common operating conditions at the forward error correction threshold and point out the role of the transmitter and receiver telescopes: for practical size (e.g., 1 m), relevant limitations arise, which we combine with the typical photons-per-bit sensitivity values in an optical link. We find that all considered modulation formats can be used at 10 Gbit/s, although with different margins and hardware requirements, particularly considering the size of the optical antennas. We then extend the analysis to higher rates, up to 40 Gbit/s. This work can open the way to the realization of optical wireless communication systems to/from the future Moon Village.