Scintillation due to atmospheric turbulence on optical GEO and MEO satellite links: Time series synthesizer for system level simulations.

Summary: Optical satellite links have been proposed in order to cover the increasing capacity demand for satellite networks. The reliable design of the performance of optical satellite links is of utmost importance. In the present paper, an analytical methodology for the generation of time series of scintillation due to atmospheric turbulence of optical satellite links is proposed. Under cloud‐free line of sight, scintillation causes the degradation of link's quality. In order to design adaptive transmission techniques for scintillation compensation, an accurate channel model for time series synthesis is required. The proposed synthesizer is based on stochastic differential equations (SDEs) driven by fractional Brownian motion and generates log‐amplitude time series for plane and spherical waves affected by turbulence. The links are considered between Ground and Geostationary or Medium Earth Orbit satellites. The synthesizer is validated using the theoretical aspects of scintillation considering the first‐ and second‐order statistics. Additionally, the performance of the synthesizer for the case of Geostationary is validated with data from ARTEMIS optical satellite link experiment carried out by European Space Agency. The proposed synthesizer can be directly employed for the system performance of transmission techniques for optical satellite forward and reverse links taking into account the scintillation effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]