Attenuation compensation techniques for ultra-reliable high throughput satellite integrated network

To support future development in satellite communication systems in the Ka-band and above, this paper studies the beacon attenuation measurements recorded at Chilbolton in Southern England to evaluate the performance of Time Diversity (TD) and Site Diversity (SD) techniques. TD performance is computed by comparing the measured rain attenuation time series with a delayed version of itself. Five (5) time delays were employed, namely 1, 5, 10, 30 and 60 seconds. SD performance is obtained by using the single-site rain attenuation data at Chilbolton and the ITU-R P.618-13 recommendation [1], with inter-site distances 1, 5, 10, and 20 km, and baseline angle fixed at 90°. Analytical results of the selection combining (SC)-based TD and SD performance are validated by MATLAB simulations. Results show that the TD and SD are significant techniques for handling the effect of rain attenuation. However, to be effective, TD requires long time delays, whereas SD requires large inter-site separation distances and additional terrestrial infrastructure. Significant improvement in TD performance is obtained by using maximal ratio combining (MRC), rather than selection, to produce the carrier signal input to the demodulator at the receiver end. This improvement is demonstrated in the simulation results presented in the paper.