Outage performance of terrestrial radio communication networks operating above 50 GHz: Impact of rain attenuation

The continuously increasing demand for high capacity radio links leads to the employment of extremely high frequency bands above 50 GHz. In these frequency bands, the attenuation caused by hydrometeors (rain, clouds and gases) is much greater. In this paper, the lognormal distribution is proposed to be used for the calculation of the long-term rain attenuation exceedance probability. A combined physical raincell model taking into account both the stratiform and the convective structure of the rainfall medium is studied for extremely high frequencies. Moreover, the impact of the spatial inhomogeneity parameter on rain attenuation exceedance prediction is investigated. Finally, the outage probability of a dual branch receive diversity system, as well as a dual-hop system, which are usual configurations of terrestrial communication networks, is calculated at these frequency bands using the bivariate lognormal distribution.