Ultra-High Capacity Optical Satellite Communication System Using PDM-256-QAM and Optical Angular Momentum Beams

Twisted light beams such as optical angular momentum (OAM) with numerous possible orthogonal states have drawn the prodigious contemplation of researchers. OAM multiplexing is a futuristic multi-access technique that has not been scrutinized for optical satellite communication (OSC) systems thus far, and it opens up a new window for ultra-high-capacity systems. This paper presents the 4.8 Tbps (5 wavelengths × 3 OAM beams × 320 Gbps) ultra-high capacity OSC system by incorporating polarization division multiplexed (PDM) 256-Quadrature amplitude modulation (256-QAM) and OAM beams. To realize OAM multiplexing, Laguerre Gaussian (LG) transverse mode profiles such as LG00, LG140, and LG400 were used in the proposed study. The effects of the receiver’s digital signal processing (DSP) module were also investigated, and performance improvement was observed using DSP for its potential to compensate for the effects of dispersion, phase errors, and nonlinear effects using the blind phase search (BPS), Viterbi phase estimation (VPE), and the constant modulus algorithm (CMA). The results revealed that the proposed OAM-OSC system successfully covered the 22,000 km OSC link distance and, out of three OAM beams, fundamental mode LG00 offered excellent performance. Further, a detailed comparison of the proposed system and reported state-of-the-art schemes was performed.