On the Role of Reflectarrays for Interplanetary Links

Interplanetary links (IPL) serve as crucial enablers for space exploration, facilitating secure and adaptable space missions. An integrated IPL with inter-satellite communication (IP-ISL) establishes a unified deep space network, expanding coverage and reducing atmospheric losses. In order to evaluate the performance of both realistic and cost efficient IP-ISL scenario, the challenges, including irregularities in charged density, hardware impairments, and hidden celestial body brightness are analyzed with a reflectarray-based IP-ISL between Earth and Moon orbiters. In this regard, free-space channel is modeled with the charge density irregularities that disturb the angle of arrival. A discretize solution for noise temperature analyze in celestial body brightness is given with average beam occupancy. Lastly, the impact of aggregated phase noise, in-phase and quadrature imbalance and non-linear amplifier are modeled with generalized stochastic hardware impairments. As a solution, the ideal and non-ideal compensation of angle of arrival with the perfect knowledge of it is analyzed. It is observed that 10^{-8} order severe hardware impairments with intense solar plasma density drops an ideal system's spectral efficiency (SE) from \sim 38~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz} down to 0~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz} . An ideal full angle of arrival fluctuation recovery with full steering range achieves \sim 20~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz} gain and a limited beamsteering with a numerical reflectarray design achieves at least \sim 1~\textrm {(bit/s)/Hz} gain in severe hardware impairment cases. As a result, we assess the feasibility of an integrated IP-ISL system design to establish a unified deep space network, expanding coverage and reducing atmospheric losses between the Moon and Earth in terms of spectral efficiency, addressing real-life deep space communication challenges.