Study on all-optical cross-band frequency conversion for communication satellite

A novel all-optical cross-band frequency conversion method for communication satellite is proposed and studied in this paper. An optical frequency comb (OFC) based on a Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) and a DFB laser is used as optical carrier and multi-wavelength local oscillators. The frequency conversion among C-band, Ku-band, K-band and Ka-band by feeding input signals of different frequency to the proposed scheme is demonstrated in the simulation. The proposed solution makes the cross-band frequency conversion possible and flexible, showing good application potential in the communication satellite systems of future.