Large‐scale site diversity for satellite communication networks

The utilization of high frequencies, such as Ka‐band and beyond, necessary to avoid the highly congested lower satellite frequencies and to get larger bandwidth availability is considered for many developing satellite systems. The new satellite low‐margin systems in Ka‐band will need to be designed using fade countermeasures to counteract rain attenuation. One of these techniques foresees the possibility of switching the communication link among different Earth stations spread on a very large territory to reduce the system outage time to the joint outage time of all the stations. The design of such systems depends on the probability that the Earth stations simultaneously exceed their margins. In this paper, a well‐assessed model is utilized for the prediction of joint statistics of rain attenuation in multiple locations, using Monte Carlo simulation. The model is based on a pair of multi‐variate normal processes whose parameters are related to those characterizing the single‐location statistics and whose covariance matrices are assumed to depend only on the distances between locations. The main results concerning both the probability and margin improvement will be presented and discussed.