IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (Jan 2024)

On the Role of Reflectarrays for Interplanetary Links

  • Eray Guven,
  • Pablo Camacho,
  • Elham Baladi,
  • Gunes Karabulut Kurt

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/OJCOMS.2024.3463568
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5
pp. 6227 – 6238

Abstract

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Interplanetary links (IPL) serve as crucial enablers for space exploration, facilitating secure and adaptable space missions. An integrated IPL with inter-satellite communication (IP-ISL) establishes a unified deep space network, expanding coverage and reducing atmospheric losses. In order to evaluate the performance of both realistic and cost efficient IP-ISL scenario, the challenges, including irregularities in charged density, hardware impairments, and hidden celestial body brightness are analyzed with a reflectarray-based IP-ISL between Earth and Moon orbiters. In this regard, free-space channel is modeled with the charge density irregularities that disturb the angle of arrival. A discretize solution for noise temperature analyze in celestial body brightness is given with average beam occupancy. Lastly, the impact of aggregated phase noise, in-phase and quadrature imbalance and non-linear amplifier are modeled with generalized stochastic hardware impairments. As a solution, the ideal and non-ideal compensation of angle of arrival with the perfect knowledge of it is analyzed. It is observed that $10^{-8}$ order severe hardware impairments with intense solar plasma density drops an ideal system’s spectral efficiency (SE) from $\sim 38~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz}$ down to $0~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz}$ . An ideal full angle of arrival fluctuation recovery with full steering range achieves $\sim 20~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz}$ gain and a limited beamsteering with a numerical reflectarray design achieves at least $\sim 1~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz}$ gain in severe hardware impairment cases. As a result, we assess the feasibility of an integrated IP-ISL system design to establish a unified deep space network, expanding coverage and reducing atmospheric losses between the Moon and Earth in terms of spectral efficiency, addressing real-life deep space communication challenges.

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