Hybrid Fade Mitigation Technique for Ultra-Reliable High Throughput Satellite System

Rain attenuation is one of the primary concerns when setting up a satellite communication link, and can lead to link degradation, especially at frequencies above 10 GHz. Proven strategies such as time diversity (TD) and site diversity (SD) are fade mitigation approaches that can overcome signal degradation. Moreover, exploiting signal combining techniques can provide a step towards harnessing the diversity over the individual links, where maximal-ratio-combining (MRC) is proven to maximise the signal-to-interference ratio. Previous works have only addressed the individual performance of TD or SD with MRC in the absence of an integrated solution. MRC-based TD performance is determined by comparing the measured rain attenuation time-series with a delayed version of itself, using delays of 1, 5, 10, 30, and 60 s. TD and SD operate independently of each other to respectively exploit the temporal and spatial variabilities of rain attenuation. This work builds on the literature and baseline performance to investigate the joint application of TD, SD and MRC using the ITU-R P.1853-0 recommendation [1] for modelling the rain attenuation time series. The results are based on MATLAB simulations and show that combining SD with low-delay TD achieves a significant fade mitigation, thus making the hybrid technique suitable for application in satellite systems that require low latency connectivity.