Seidel optical aberrations and optimum truncated Gaussian beams on intersatellite free-space optical communications

Intersatellite free-space optical communications are the backbone of the future high-speed global communication networks. In orbit, thermo-mechanical loads create perturbations that detriment the performance of these links. Among these perturbations, the transmitter pointing jitter and optical aberrations are of special relevance. We present an analysis of the coupled effects of transmitter pointing jitter and optical aberrations on intersatellite free space optical communications. A mathematical model is presented to evaluate the performance of average bit error probability, probability of outage, and reliability on intersatellite free space optical communication links subjected to these perturbations. Furthermore, the optimum non-aberrated truncated Gaussian beams are obtained for each of these performance parameters for different telescope architectures. The results demonstrate that the performance parameters are highly sensitive to the optimal far-field irradiances. These optimum operation points are then perturbed by Seidel aberrations to study the effect of these aberrations in the system. The results show that optical communication terminals are most sensitive to coma aberrations, mainly due to the induced apparent angle of arrival on the beacon beam. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations of combinations of Seidel aberrations show a strong dependency on the telescope architecture of the sensitivity of the communication performance parameter to the magnitude of the optical aberrations.