Site Diversity Gain for Earth-to-Satellite Links Using Rain Intensity Measurement

Md Rafiqul Islam,M H Habaebi,Ali Kadhim Lwas

doi:10.52549/ijeei.v5i4.364

Abstract

Site diversity technique is effective method to overcome rain attenuation, mostly in the tropics where high precipitation is predominant. The method is analyzed based on measurements in two locations separated by 37.36 Km in Malaysia. From concurrent measured rain intensities of two locations at IIUM and UKM for one year, it was found that only ten concurrent events had occurred containing highest rain intensities of 18 mm/h with outage probability of 0.00154% on two locations out of about 381 events experienced over one year period. These findings will be very useful for Earth-to-satellite link designers to improve reliability by applying site diversity as a rain fade mitigation technique at any frequency.

Highlights

Microwave links that use frequency higher than 10 GHz have a serious problem with weather, primarily rain
The result indicates that the measured site diversity gain is very close to that predicted by ITU-R and Hodge model for baseline angle of 900 with 37.36 km separation and MEASAT3 as reference satellite
Site diversity technique is analyzed based on 1-minute rain rate measurements in two locations separated by 37.36 Km in Malaysia for one year period

Summary

Introduction

Microwave links that use frequency higher than 10 GHz have a serious problem with weather, primarily rain. The distance separating the two sites, d is in kilometers; A is the path rain attenuation in decibels, f is the frequency in gigahertz, θ is the elevation angle of the link path in degrees, and β is the angle made by the azimuth of the propagation path with respect to the baseline between the sites, chosen such that β ≤ 90°. The new model's performance was validated using three existing site diversity models while varying link parameters Based on this validation, the authors show that the proposed model can be used to predict site diversity gains in relation to site separation and elevations angle with better accuracy, as compared to the three examined models. The proposed model is a function of, d: the separation distance in km, AS: the single-site attenuation in dB, f: the link frequency in GHz, θ: the angle of elevation in degrees and β: the baseline orientation angle in degrees.

Event date

Elevation Angle

Conclusion