Abstract

This paper addresses the architecture of optical satellite networks from the physical to the transport and application layers. New frontiers exist for much more research before an efficient architecture can be constructed. Optical wireless networks have the potential to serve space–space, space–terrestrial/aircraft, and aircraft–aircraft data centers and metropolitan area networks. Though the technology in these applications is similar in nature, the architecture constructs and protocol tuning can be very different. Free-space optical networks have two attributes that are not encountered in fiber networks and those are their ability to connect without predeployment of infrastructures and the ability to reconfigure their connection topology by beam steering in time scales of milliseconds to seconds to adapt to traffic loads (as high as Tbps per connection), satellite and mobile platform movements, switching node states, and atmospheric conditions. This paper emphasizes a multi-layer approach to optical wireless networks and how the network architecture can be tuned to specific applications.

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