Bridging the gap in modulation selection for satellite optical communication

The integration of space and terrestrial networks is envisaged as a promising approach to achieve enhanced quality of service in terms of coverage, throughput and data traffic management. To this end, optical wireless communication represents a suitable technology to realize reliable and high-rate ground-space and inter-satellite links. In this paper, we present an overview of all the components characterizing optical satellite link budget. Furthermore, we investigate the key relevance of link outage by jointly taking into account the effect of pointing loss and channel turbulence, representing random phenomena that can only be modeled statistically. Finally, communication feasibility is discussed for different ground-satellite configurations, showing how to select the most suited transmission scheme, i.e. modulation, so as to meet the requested reliability constraints and achieve the best performance.