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Organizers:
Morio Toyoshima, National Insitute of Information & Comm Tech, Japan
Murat Yuksel, University of Central Florida, USA
Eleni Diamanti, Universite Pierre et Marie Curie, France
Description:
Optical Wireless Communication (OWC), also called free-space optical communication, has evolved in many significant ways recently and is now employed in a wide range of applications extending to space. Long-distance, high data rate communication in space is becoming increasingly important to support science data transfer, telemetry, remote monitoring, and Internet connectivity. As a result, there is a trend in space communication to transition from radio frequency-based links to links using optical beams. Key motivations are an unregulated spectrum, smaller size/weight, lower power consumption per bit, larger bandwidth, and significantly smaller beam diffraction, resulting in much smaller link loss and thus higher capacity. The promising OWC applications in space will include Low Earth Orbit satellite constellations and High-Altitude Platform Stations with Optical Inter-Satellite Links (OISLs), inter-satellite mesh networks, low latency networking, and integration of satellites and 5G-and-beyond. In addition, quantum technologies presently attract great interest for their potential applications in computing, sensing and communications. Satellite-based quantum communications are interesting in this context for linking securely quantum devices to provide groundbreaking services leveraging space networks at a global scale. Several challenges need to be overcome to make future applications based on space optical links a reality. The workshop will aim to discuss the gigabit-per-second speed communication, the pointing-and-acquisition-tuning of OISLs at extremely high orbital speeds, the dynamic network routing and the economic viability for OWC in space as well as the novel and secure space network concept based on optical technologies for satellite quantum information networks.