Laboratory emulation of LEO downlink optical feeder link employing commercial transceivers

Free space optics (FSO) wireless backhauls incorporating non-terrestrial nodes constitute a viable solution to provide fiber-like Terabits per second connectivity in rural and remote areas. The heritage coming from terrestrial fiber networks hastens the development of FSO links. However, optical feeder links (OFLs), connecting ground stations to satellites, experience power fading due to atmospheric turbulence. Since fiber-based hardware is not designed to withstand fading, its employment in OFLs must be investigated. To this end, this paper proposes a novel testbed based on an efficient and compact fading emulator. The testbed is used to analyse the performance of commercial 10 Gigabit Ethernet transceivers under emulated turbulence representative of a downlink OFL involving a low Earth orbit satellite.