Investigation of Millimeter Wave’s Cross Polarization Discrimination in Sand and Dust Storms

Abstract

The performance of electromagnetic wave links in sand and dust storms has received considerable interest of researchers in recent time, especially with emphasis on the signal attenuation. However, phase rotation and cross-polarization have not been sufficiently treated. This work investigates the cross-polarization discrimination as a result of sand and dust storms at high frequency such as the millimeter wave band. The paper introduces simple mathematical models of wave propagation in sand and dust storms, and developed based on the forward scattering amplitude of sand and dust particles using the Rayleigh technique. The suitability of the Rayleigh approximation for the models are validated by setting three different conditions. The results show that that the technique is valid for determining the scattering of ellipsoidal sand and dust particles for the sizes considered and frequency range. The scattering coefficients are thus derived and models for attenuation and phase rotation are proposed in terms of visibility. The results obtained from the proposed models show close agreement with some earlier published results when compared. Differential attenuation and differential phase rotation are computed and the cross-polarization discriminations are then predicted using the parameters from the models as inputs. The attenuation during dry sand and dust storms becomes significant only when the visibility is low and severe. At such visibility, the cross-polarization discriminations also become low (i.e. significant) and the same trend and pattern is found as the frequency is increased.