Microwave-photonic technologies for satellite telecommunication payloads: a focus on photonic RF frequency conversion

The future generation of Very High Throughput Satellites (VHTS) for telecommunication purposes will bring a huge impact in terms of payload mass, volume and power consumption requirements in order to meet the increased capacity and achievable performance demand. The introduction of the photonic technology, which is already well developed for terrestrial networks, can represent one of the possible approaches to reduce the payload system complexity. This paper provides a brief overview on possible applications of microwave/photonic technologies to implement operations needed in a Satellite Communication (SATCOM) payload, focusing on advantages of Radio Frequency (RF) signal mixing in the photonic domain. A configuration scheme of a photonic RF mixer based on a dual port Mach-Zehnder Modulator (MZM) and two photonic local oscillators, used as RF downconverter, is presented and discussed.