Achievable Capacity of Geostationary-Ground Optical Links

We estimate the capacity of optical links at telecom wavelengths built upon existing terrestrial technologies. We study the impact of molecular absorption while varying the modulation scheme and compare the result with the ultimate capacity achievable in void. We then investigate the impact of atmospheric turbulence and evaluate how much capacity we recover with current mitigation techniques such as adaptive optics, and data coding coupled with delay diversity or data interleaving. We conclude by evaluating the achievable capacity in the presence of molecular absorption and atmospheric turbulence.