An improved ITU-R rain attenuation prediction model over terrestrial microwave links in tropical region

• Main Authors: Islam, Md. Rafiqul, Abdulrahman, Yusuf A., Rahman, Tharek A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Springer 2012
• Subjects: TK5101 Telecommunication. Including telegraphy, radio, radar, television
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/24893/1/EURASIP_ARTICLE.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/24893/; http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1687-1499-2012-189

An improved approach of predicting rain attenuation cumulative distribution (CD) over terrestrial microwave links operating in tropical regions is presented in this article. The proposed method offers a better extrapolation approach for determining the values of rain attenuation at different exceedance probability from the measured attenuation at 0.01% of the time. The experimental data consist of measured rainfall rates and rain attenuation over six geographically spread DIGI MINI-LINKs operating at 15 GHz in Malaysia. A new set of numerical coefficients was derived for improved rain attenuation CD predictions in the Malaysian tropical climate. In order to test the applicability of the proposed extrapolation method, a validation was performed using rain rate and rain attenuation measurements from five Brazilian and seven Nigerian tropical locations. When tested against measurements, the proposed method seems to provide a significant improvement over the current extrapolation method adopted by ITU-R Recommendations P.530-14, for the prediction of rain attenuation CD over tropical regions.