On the estimation of rain attenuation channels in millimeter wave radio networks

Modern wireless mesh networks are used to connect users with an existing core network creating multi-hop transmissions. Since these networks require large bandwidth to support increased data rates, the employment of frequencies above 10 GHz is desirable. At these frequency bands, rain attenuation is the dominant fading mechanism exhibiting spatial inhomogeneity. In this paper, we propose a method for estimation of rain fading channel by investigating the effect of correlation between the rain attenuations of different paths on the performance of modern networks. Since these rain attenuation channels are highly correlated, the rain attenuation of a specific path can be estimated by the values of rain attenuation of another path. Extended numerical results in various propagation conditions (geometric and climatic) investigate the performance gain of a linear and a non-linear estimator.