Low-Cost Ground Station Network Siting for Geostationary Space-to-Ground Laser Communication

The deployment of multi-link ground station networks for geostationary space-to-ground laser communication is constrained not only by local weather conditions but also by infrastructure accessibility and engineering cost. Existing ground station siting studies have mainly emphasized cloud-related meteorological indicators and site diversity, while giving insufficient attention to deployment-oriented cost factors. As a result, meteorologically favorable solutions may still be expensive to implement in practice. To address this issue, this paper investigates the low-cost siting problem of a ground station network under a target network availability constraint and proposes a two-stage method for a multi-link, single-telescope scenario. Under the adopted assumption, each ground station can provide at most one available link at any given time, so the number of available network links is equal to the number of clear-sky available stations. The network availability is therefore defined as the probability that at least a required number of links are simultaneously available. Using half-hourly cloud mask data from the Himawari 8 geostationary meteorological satellite for the year 2023, site-neighborhood cloud metrics and inter-site weather correlation metrics are constructed. A data-center clustering and distance-decay model is then introduced to build an infrastructure impact cost field. On this basis, nationwide optimization is carried out through candidate construction and final subset selection. A baseline method without data-center factors is also evaluated under the same total-cost definition. The results show that, under the same target network availability requirement, the proposed method can effectively reduce total deployment cost. This indicates that incorporating data-center factors during siting improves the engineering tradeoff of multi-link geostationary laser communication ground station networks and provides a reproducible route for low-cost planning under service availability constraints.