SkyNet Airborne Hybrid FSO/RF Communication System

Free Space Optical (FSO) communications provide numerous advantages over traditional RF based wireless systems including high data rates and long link distances, low probability of interception and detection, resistance to jamming, and low Size Weight and Power. These advantages are however hampered by the inability to operate through heavy clouds, fog and dust. This inability to provide high availability data communications under all conditions has limited the wide spread use of this promising technology. To address this potential, SA Photonics is pleased to propose the SkyNet Hybrid RF-Free Space Optical (FSO) communication system. SA Photonics’ SkyNet Hybrid system provides a truly integrated solution that provides FSO/RF load balancing, joint FEC-coding and retransmission, and other modes of operation at the physical layer. By operating at the physical layer, these operations occur on a modem frame basis and data processing decisions are made on real-time physical layer channel metrics such as estimated receive SNR, block error rates, and retransmission rates. This physical layer solution not only provides increased throughput, but also provides significantly improved IP layer operation that is fully transparent to the network level with reduced latency, reduced jitter, and reduced packet loss.