Environmental-data collection system testbed for site-diversity implementation in satellite-to-ground laser communications

Site diversity technology is critical for satellite-to-ground laser links availability improvement. In order to develop handover decision algorithm and to choose uncorrelated sites, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology has developed a testbed with environmental-data collection systems, deployed in ten different sites within Japan. Three of these locations already have 1-meter telescopes installed for future satellite lasercom missions. In this paper we introduce the testbed and show some of the statistics of the collected data concerning site correlation and link availability.