Link budget assessment for GEO feeder links based on optical technology

Nowadays, large geostationary orbit (GEO) satellites can offer capacities up to 260 Gbps. In the midterm, in order to cope with the forecasted traffic demand, multibeam high throughput satellite systems are already being deployed. Optical GEO feeder link technology may provide transmission data rates up to the order of several terabits per second by making use of wavelength division multiplexing schemes. This work identifies physical layer techniques that enable the transmission of DVB-S2X RF modulated signals over optical carriers. The techniques reported here are the analog transparent (AT), digital transparent (DT), and the digital regenerative schemes, which require different satellite payload architectures. The effects of atmospheric turbulence over the traveling wave are addressed and discussed, along with a methodology to calculate the link budget in the feeder uplink channel. Link budget calculations for two different selected ground station locations are presented, for the both the AT and DT options. It is shown that for high altitude locations, the transmission using the AT and DT options works well. For midaltitude locations, typical 36 MHz signal are feasible, whereas for higher bandwidths, the DT option could work when an error correction code is used.