Outage Performance Analysis of a Dual-Hop Radio Relay System Operating at Frequencies above 10GHz

The ever increasing demand for multimedia services has led to the extensive use of fixed wireless outdoor networks, where the transmitted information signals arrive to the final destination through a relay node, creating a dual-hop transmission. Due to the increased demand for bandwidth and the spectral congestion at low frequencies, operation at frequencies above 10GHz satisfying the Line-Of-Sight condition is required. At this frequency range, the dominant fading mechanism exposing spatial and temporal stochastic properties is rain attenuation, typically modeled as a lognormal flat fading channel when expressed in dB (log-lognormal in linear scale). In this paper, the outage performance of a dual hop system using several radio relay types is presented and physical prediction models with analytical formulas are proposed, employing spatially correlated lognormal fading channels. Extended numerical results investigate the impact of various operational, geometrical and geographical radio relay parameters, as well as the impact of the employment of a relay channel estimator, on the end-to-end performance.