Prospects of Visible Light Communications in Satellites

We present the exploratory approach of Project FOCS (Free Space Optical communications for Space), which aims at proposing and demonstrating new applications of Visible Light Communications (VLC) for satellites. The first selected application scenario that will be investigated deals with transmission of Gbit/s signals on very small satellites, e.g. CubeSats. The second selected research line will be about low-bit-rate communication between satellites over > 100 m distances.