Ionizing radiation impact on communications performance of optical multi-hop inter-satellite relay link

Ionizing radiation impact on communications performance of optical multi-hop inter-satellite relay links is studied in this paper. Essential optoelectronic devices involved in optical communication system were irradiated by Co60 gamma ray and BER models of OOK, DPSK and homodyne BPSK of multi-hop inter-satellite links were proposed. On this basis, performance degradations under ionizing radiation were simulated, and on-orbit performance degradations were further discussed. Research results show that EDFA of ionizing radiation is the dominant cause of optical relay link communication performance degradation and the choosing of relay satellite has significant influence on on-orbit performance of links. The anti-ionizing radiation capability of homodyne BPSK model obviously outperforms OOK and DPSK models.