Design and Performance Analysis of Laser Array Scanning in Airborne Communication

During the process of establishing airborne optical links traditionally, the scanning of field of uncertain (FOU) is very important and its performance cannot be improved easily because of the limitation of the range and bandwidth of pointing mechanisms. The technology of optical phased arrays (OPAs) can make a fast scanning, but it is not practical because of its low efficiency, narrow range and high cost. With the development of laser array technologies, the laser array with low cost and high beam quality is available, which provides an opportunity for the enhancement of scanning performance. A novel design of multiple-beam scanning for optical terminals is presented in this paper, which can improve scanning performance dramatically. With this special and innovative design, optical terminals can implement a fast scanning by taking advantage of the high bandwidth of the fine pointing assembly (FPA) and the bandwidth-limited characteristics of the vibration for the satellite platform. The improvement in scanning performance is verified by the simulation and testing of this system design.