Comparison and analysis of tropospheric scintillation models for Northern Malaysia

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a study on tropospheric scintillation on satellite link that has been performed at University Sains Malaysia (USM) to obtain statistics of scintillation from the 12.255 GHz Superbird-C satellite with an elevation angle of 40.1°. Comparison of existing tropospheric scintillation models, namely the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Direct Physical-Statistical Prediction (DPSP), Modeled Physical-Statistical Prediction (MPSP), Kamp–Tervonen–Salonen (KVS), and Karasawa were done for the measurement site. Then, cumulative distributions of measured scintillation intensity compared to the result of the prediction models for tropospheric scintillation were plotted and analyzed. ITU-R model gave the best prediction of 5.8% of error at 0.1% of fading time, compared with the other models.