Ground terminals via remote digital-beam-forming networks for satellites in non-geostationary orbit

Abstract

A receiving terminal for communication via NGSO satellites comprises an outdoor unit coupled to an indoor unit via optical fibers. The outdoor unit comprises an array antenna for capturing signals from the satellites; low-noise amplifiers; analog-to-digital conversion blocks for converting the captured signals to digital signals; a pre-processor for performing a wavefront multiplexing transform on the digital signals and generating wavefront multiplexed signals; and RF-to-optical drivers for transforming the wavefront multiplexed signals to optical waveforms. The indoor unit comprises optical-to-RF converters for optical demodulating the optical waveforms to recover the wavefront multiplexed signals; a post-processor for performing a wavefront demultiplexing transform on the wavefront multiplexed signals to recover the digital signals, the wavefront demultiplexing transform being an inverse of the wavefront multiplexing transform; a remote digital beam-forming network for generating receive beam signals from the recovered digital signals; and RF demodulators for generating data streams from the receive beam signals.