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Performance of Equatorial Time Diversity Systems Evaluated from Rain Rate Time Series

Abstract:

Satellite communications are expanding into higher frequency bands in order to fulfil growing capacity requirements. As it is well known, frequencies beyond 10 GHz are subject to rain attenuation along the propagation path, which in turn increases the system outage probability. These effects are particularly severe for heavy rainfall regions (e.g. tropical/equatorial regions). There are various Propagation Impairment Mitigation Techniques (PIMTs) to manage these impairments, such as signal processing, power control and diversity. A cost-effective countermeasure that can be applied under the conditions described above is time diversity. In this work, the rain attenuation time series is simulated through the Satellite Synthetic Storm Technique (S-SST), its input being the time series of rain rate provided by four rain gauges placed in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Finally, the performance of the time diversity technique is statistically evaluated through the diversity gain and relative diversity gain, parameters that depend on the retransmission delay used in different scenarios. Results demonstrate an overall enhancement in system performance.