A Chip-based frequency comb FSOC system as a basis for super channel architecture that can utilize coherent processing due to the fixed phase relationship between all comb laser lines.

Optical frequency combs (f-combs) are an emerging disruptive laser technology capable of replacing 10s to 100s of individual CW lasers to produce densely packed optical superchannel transmitters. For free-space optical communication (FSOC) applications, a more profound advantage over arrays of independent laser transmitters (ie. ‘dumb’ lasers), is that frequency combs have an intrinsic phase relationship between the channels which allows ‘pilot’ channels to be allocated that can be digitally and coherently processed at the receiver end. A further advantage of using a frequency-comb based transmitter is the potential for a signal processing mechanism to compensate for atmospheric distortion for all comb lines. This proposed architecture could in the future be evolved towards a completely smart and reconfigurable software driven transmitter.

Our proposed FSOC transmitter is a unique and stable chip laser frequency comb architecture that is at an early TRL for this application but has already been demonstrated to produce a world-leading stable frequency comb, and to date only been applied to spectroscopic applications.

An anomaly can be defined as a data or unwanted observations which can also be an outlier in a dataset. As IoT gather a huge volume of data, there could be many outliers, and it will be a difficult task to classify an outlier among a huge set of data observations. There are many Anomaly detection techniques existing in the current literature, but many of them require massive processing and iterative training, so that an anomaly can be detected. In recent years, a distributed<br>ledger which is maintained by all the peers within a peer-to-peer network, called Blockchain, has been proposed to detect anomalies in IoT networks.

The core idea behind this Blockchain-based anomaly detection is to provide a new de-centralised system which is a trust-based and immutable. Each transaction is represented by a block, and since each block is built on top of the previous block, the immutability has been achieved. Here immutability means it is very difficult to fake/alter a block and very easy to detect any tampering. Using the fork mechanism in the Blockchain technology, anomaly detection in IoT networks can be achieved. As part of Blockchain-based anomaly detection, we propose to collect, share, and enrich the information with other peers in the networks. In this context, a peer can be a satellite or an IoT or a ground station.

This project will establish the potential gains from advanced adaptive satellite communication technologies. Highly flexible software defined radios have been very successful in enabling a wide variety of applications in terrestrial communications. Recently, the field of networking has been revolutionised by software defined networking allowing vastly more scope to network operators to define new services, reduce the system cost and enable inter-operability between heterogeneous satellite and terrestrial systems. There is enormous potential for these technologies to be applied to satellite systems.

This includes Software Defined Networking (SDN) solutions to centralise the orchestration of the whole network, the control and sharing of the network resources, implementations of intelligent Software Defined Radio (SDR) transponders and user terminals with machine learning technologies, advanced digital multibeam precoding, dynamic control of multi-spot beam patterns and distributed computing tasks based on traffic conditions and QoS requirements. The project will engage relevant researchers from industry and academia to establish which elements are the key factors and bottlenecks in delivering gains from next generation satellites.

Tuneable Photonic Crystals for the millimeter-wave, Terahertz, and Infrared regimes have important applications for satellite communications and remote sensing.

In this application, we are proposing the fabrication of a novel metamaterial for frequency-tuneable, photonic-crystal (PhC) bandpass filters in the 0.03-30 THz region; this corresponds to wavelengths in the 10 mm to 10 𝜇𝑚 regime–which encompass mm-wave, terahertz, and far- to mid-infrared communications. As the photonic crystal filters are dynamically tuneable, they will be used to modulate carrier waves in the 0.03-30 THz frequency band, e.g. to generate FM or AM modulated signals. These wavelengths are especially useful in space, as they can be used for communications between satellites and/or high-altitude balloons. The PhC filters can also be used to “tune into” specific frequencies which are amplified, as occurs in an RF receiver. Finally, where transmitters and receivers are modulated synchronously, the encoded information can be sent securely between satellites &amp; balloons at useful rates.

The research fits best within the SmartSat “Dynamic Payloads for Communications and Earth Observations” and will provide SmartSat CRC with a key technological edge.

The aim of this project is to identify areas of growth in satellite spectrum monitoring. It will provide advice on what technology capabilities can be developed within Australia and assess the market potential. The main outcome will be a report describing: potential users, the user requirements and a plan to meet those requirements.

The final report will also quantify the expected social and economic benefit to Australia of developing a sovereign space-based spectrum monitoring system.

The report will include a survey of relevant technologies that either already exist or can be developed in Australia. By matching the user requirements with available technologies, the report will provide advice on what research areas need to be focused on.

In space communications, authentication plays an important role as a security technique that verifies and validates satellite identity. Single authentication can be weak and compromised. This project will investigate a novel two-layered multifactor authentication (2L-MFA) accompanied by a decentralized blockchain-based Satellite and IoT environment. The first-level authentication is for IoT devices and considers the secret key, geographical location, and the physically unclonable function (PUF). For lightweight and low latency support, proof-of authentication (PoAh) and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman are used. Second-level authentication is for Satellite users and is subcategorized into four factor levels, namely identity, password, and the Nonce code (Blockchain). Matrix-based password enrolment in level 1, Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDSA) in level 2, ensure Satellite-level authentication. Fuzzy logic will be deployed to validate the authentication and make the system stronger. The proposed 2L-MFA is evaluated in terms of registration time, login time, authentication time and authentication success rate.