Fundamentals of Satellite Navigation. GPS Systems Segments. GPS Satellite Signal Characteristics and Message Formats. Satellite Signal Acquisitions and Tracking. Effects of RF Interference on GPS Satellite Signal Receiver Tracking. Performance of Standalone GPS. Differential GPS. Integration of GPS with other Sensors. Galileo. The Russian GLONASS, Chinese Bediou, and Japanese QZSS Systems. GNSS Markets and Applications.

Understanding GPS : principles and applications

In recent years, free space optical (FSO) communication has gained significant importance owing to its unique features: large bandwidth, license free spectrum, high data rate, easy and quick deployability, less power, and low mass requirements. FSO communication uses optical carrier in the near infrared band to establish either terrestrial links within the Earth’s atmosphere or inter-satellite/deep space links or ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground links. It also finds its applications in remote sensing, radio astronomy, military, disaster recovery, last mile access, backhaul for wireless cellular networks, and many more. However, despite of great potential of FSO communication, its performance is limited by the adverse effects (viz., absorption, scattering, and turbulence) of the atmospheric channel. Out of these three effects, the atmospheric turbulence is a major challenge that may lead to serious degradation in the bit error rate performance of the system and make the communication link infeasible. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various challenges faced by FSO communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. It also provides details of various performance mitigation techniques in order to have high link availability and reliability. The first part of this paper will focus on various types of impairments that pose a serious challenge to the performance of optical communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. The latter part of this paper will provide the reader with an exhaustive review of various techniques both at physical layer as well as at the other layers (link, network, or transport layer) to combat the adverse effects of the atmosphere. It also uniquely presents a recently developed technique using orbital angular momentum for utilizing the high capacity advantage of optical carrier in case of space-based and near-Earth optical communication links. This survey provides the reader with comprehensive details on the use of space-based optical backhaul links in order to provide high capacity and low cost backhaul solutions.

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Optical Communication in Space: Challenges and Mitigation Techniques

With the demanding system requirements for the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications and the severe spectrum shortage at conventional cellular frequencies, multibeam antenna systems operating in the millimeter-wave frequency bands have attracted a lot of research interest and have been actively investigated. They represent the key antenna technology for supporting a high data transmission rate, an improved signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, an increased spectral and energy efficiency, and versatile beam shaping, thereby holding a great promise in serving as the critical infrastructure for enabling beamforming and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) that boost the 5G. This paper provides an overview of the existing multibeam antenna technologies which include the passive multibeam antennas (MBAs) based on quasi-optical components and beamforming circuits, multibeam phased-array antennas enabled by various phase-shifting methods, and digital MBAs with different system architectures. Specifically, their principles of operation, design, and implementation, as well as a number of illustrative application examples are reviewed. Finally, the suitability of these MBAs for the future 5G massive MIMO wireless systems as well as the associated challenges is discussed.

Multibeam Antenna Technologies for 5G Wireless Communications

Recently, multiple description source coding has emerged as an attractive framework for robust multimedia transmission over packet erasure channels. In this paper, we mathematically analyze the performance of n-channel symmetric FEC-based multiple description coding for a progressive mode of transmission over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) networks in a frequency-selective slowly-varying Rayleigh faded environment. We derive the expressions for the bounds of the throughput and distortion performance of the system in an explicit closed form, whereas the exact performance is given by an expression in the form of a single integration. Based on this analysis, the performance of the system can be numerically evaluated. Our results show that at high SNR, the multiple description encoder does not need to fine-tune the optimization parameters of the system due to the correlated nature of the subcarriers. It is also shown that, despite the bursty nature of the errors in a slow fading environment, FEC-based multiple description coding without temporal coding provides a greater advantage for smaller description sizes.

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Performance Analysis of $n$ -Channel Symmetric FEC-Based Multiple Description Coding for OFDM Networks

In recent years, free space optical communication has gained significant importance owing to its unique features: large bandwidth, license-free spectrum, high data rate, easy and quick deployability, less power and low mass requirements. FSO communication uses the optical carrier in the near infrared band to establish either terrestrial links within the Earth's atmosphere or inter-satellite or deep space links or ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground links. However, despite the great potential of FSO communication, its performance is limited by the adverse effects viz., absorption, scattering, and turbulence of the atmospheric channel. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various challenges faced by FSO communication system for ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. It also provides details of various performance mitigation techniques in order to have high link availability and reliability. The first part of the paper will focus on various types of impairments that pose a serious challenge to the performance of optical communication system for ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. The latter part of the paper will provide the reader with an exhaustive review of various techniques both at physical layer as well as at the other layers i.e., link, network or transport layer to combat the adverse effects of the atmosphere. It also uniquely presents a recently developed technique using orbital angular momentum for utilizing the high capacity advantage of the optical carrier in case of space-based and near-Earth optical communication links. This survey provides the reader with comprehensive details on the use of space-based optical backhaul links in order to provide high-capacity and low-cost backhaul solutions.

/pdf/optical-communication-in-space-challenges-and-mitigation-4wng3q8rfl.pdf

The paper examines the characteristics of satellite propagation channels for spread spectrum communications. Based on measurement campaigns at L-band, the signal bandwidth is determined when the channel becomes frequency-selective. A wideband channel model for land mobile satellite (LMS) services is presented which characterises the time-varying transmission channel between a satellite and a mobile user terminal. The parameters of the model are the results of fitting procedures applied to the measured data. The parameters are given for various environments and elevation angles. For satellite diversity, the correlation of two independent channels is determined. This channel property is applicable to wideband and narrowband channel models.

Channel characterisation for spread spectrum satellite communications

Two analytical methods for determining the packet error rate in the non-interleaved Rayleigh fading channel are presented. The first method is an exact evaluation of the packet error rate, whereas the second method is based on a k-state digital channel model. The fading model is a nonfrequency selective Rayleigh fading with a first-order low pass spectrum for the quadrature fading components. The analytical methods are complemented by simulations. The influence of the fading bandwidth on the packet error rate and the packet throughput is discussed. Block codes as well as convolutional codes are considered. The results show that without forward error correction the throughput for slow fading is higher than for fast fading. With forward error correction the packet error rate is sensitive to the fading bandwidth. Furthermore it is shown that the convolutional code with intra packet interleaving is least sensitive to slow fading. >

Packet error rate in the non-interleaved Rayleigh channel

This paper presents the detailed design and the key system performance results of a comprehensive laboratory demonstrator for a broadband Ka-band multi-beam satellite system exploiting the new DVB-S2 standard with adaptive coding and modulation (ACM). This complete demonstrator allows in-depth verification and optimization of the ACM techniques applied to large satellite broadband networks, as well as complementing and confirming the more theoretical or simulation-based findings published so far. It is demonstrated that few ACM configurations (in terms of modulation and coding) are able to efficiently cope with a typical Ka-band multi-beam satellite system with negligible capacity loss. It is also demonstrated that the exploitation of ACM thresholds with hysteresis represents the most reliable way to adapt the physical layer configuration to the spatial and time variability of the channel conditions while avoiding too many physical layer configuration changes. Simple ACM adaptation techniques, readily implementable over large-scale networks, are shown to perform very well, fulfilling the target packet-error rate requirements even in the presence of deep fading conditions. The impact of carrier phase noise and satellite nonlinearity has also been measured. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Adaptive coding and modulation for satellite broadband networks: From theory to practice

German aerospace center (DLR), Fraunhofer FOKUS.cats, and Tesat-Spacecom have designed a future multimedia ATM-based LEO satellite network. Part of the development was an adaptive MAC and FEC scheme which is presented in this paper. The FEC implementation switches on the fly during a connection between several FEC and modulation modes to guarantee a maximum ATM cell error rate of 10/sup -6/. In order to prevent influences of the changing FEC scheme on the user-level data rate, the MAC dynamically changes its packet lengths. Additionally, to minimize contention on the up-link, the MAC structures its TDMA frame into a fixed assigned part and a contention specific part. The boarder in between the two is dynamically altered according to the current link utilization.

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An adaptive MAC layer protocol for ATM-based LEO satellite networks

Earth-observation (EO) satellite missions produce a large amount of data using high-resolution optical or radar sensors.
During the last decades the amount of data has steadily increased due to improved sensor technologies with increased
temporal resolution, sensor resolution, and pixel count. As a consequence EO satellite missions have become limited by
the downlink data rates of microwave communication systems, which are inhibited by spectrum restrictions, manageable
antenna sizes, and available transmit power. Optical downlinks from EO satellites with data rates of several Gbps
mitigate the limiting effects of microwave communication systems; however optical links do not provide the necessary
link availability through the atmosphere due to cloud blockage above the ground station. Apart from diversity concepts
with several ground stations or satellite networks, a stratospheric High Altitude Platform (HAP) could act as a relay
station to forward the optical communication beam over the last 20km through the atmosphere to the ground station,
where short-range, high data-rate microwave systems are feasible. This paper will discuss the capabilities of HAP and
GEO relay stations to increase the downlink capacities of LEO satellites. Environmental aspects for the deployment of
HAP relays and regulatory/technology issues for a microwave downlink on the last 20km to the ground will be
discussed.

/pdf/optical-high-capacity-satellite-downlinks-via-high-altitude-4ugfzwxdqd.pdf

Hermann Bischl

Papers

Channel characterisation for spread spectrum satellite communications

Packet error rate in the non-interleaved Rayleigh channel

Adaptive coding and modulation for satellite broadband networks: From theory to practice

An adaptive MAC layer protocol for ATM-based LEO satellite networks

Optical high-capacity satellite downlinks via high-altitude platform relays