Time-Packing as Enabler of Optical Feeder Link Adaptation in High Throughput Satellite Systems

This paper studies the data rate that a High Throughput Satellite (HTS) system with fully-regenerative payload can achieve when using an intensity modulation/direct detection optical feeder link. A low-order M-ary Pulse Amplitude Modulation (M-PAM) with time-packing is used to modulate the intensity of the laser diode beam, making use of an external Mach-Zehnder modulator. These M-PAM symbols are recovered on-board the satellite with the aid of a photodetector, and are then encapsulated into the 5G radio frame of the access link. The M-PAM modulation order and the overlapping factor of timepacking are jointly selected to tackle the impact of slowly-varying weather conditions. Moreover, the inter-symbol interference that time-packing introduces is mitigated in reception using a Viterbi equalizer. As expected, time-packing enables a finer granularity on the link adaptation capability of the optical feeder link, enabling to adjust its spectral efficiency according to the moderate attenuation that thin cloud layers introduce.