Modelling of rain rate gain to mitigate rain fades for satellite links design

• Main Authors: Alam, Md Moktarul, Islam, Md. Rafiqul, Badron, Khairayu, Mullah, Momin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kansai University, Japan 2020
• Subjects: TK5101 Telecommunication. Including telegraphy, radio, radar, television
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/84223/1/84223_modelling-of-rain-rate-gain.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/84223/; https://www.kansaiuniversityreports.com/article/modelling-of-rain-rate-gain-to-mitigate-rain-fades-on-satellite-links-design

Rain attenuation is an important propagation impairments causes by troposphere which degrades the performance of Earth space communication links operating above 10 GHz frequencies. It will be the main challenge to design future Ka and V-bands satellite communication systems with high reliability. The time delay of transmission is considered as a potential technique to mitigate rain fades at these bands. To design and implement this technique requires measured real-time rain attenuation data for desired frequencies which are not obtainable at most of the places. This paper proposes a new concept of rain rate gain which can be defined as the difference of real-time rain rate with and without time delay. For the same period of time at same location, it is assumed that rain rate with time delay can represent rain attenuation with time delay by the proposed method. A model is developed to predict rain rate gain with different time delays from annual measured statistics without delay which is available at most of places. The rain rate with 1-minute integration time was measured at International Islamic University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur campus for one year and is used to develop the model. The predicted rain rate gain was compared with rain attenuation gain using Ku-band measured data at two locations in Malaysia and found similar behavior. Hence it is recommended that rain rate with delay which is converted from annual statistics can be utilized to analyze time diversity technique at any desired frequency for rain fade mitigation.