Performance of laser inter-satellite links with dynamic beam waist adjustment

In this paper, we propose the idea of dynamic beam waist adjustment for laser inter-satellite communications, and study the performance of this dynamic-beam scheme. The beam waist adjustment is based on continuous detection of the instantaneous pointing error angle, which is performed at the transmitter side. Using a square to approximate the circular detector region, we obtain a closed-form expression for calculating the proportion of power that can be collected by the receiver aperture, and derive a simple algebraic solution for the optimum dynamic beam waist. Due to its simple form, the dynamic beam waist value can be computed in real time at the transmitter, and therefore, the adjustment is practically implementable. It is shown that the performance of laser inter-satellite links with dynamic beam waist is better than that with fixed beam waist.