Performance of equatorial time diversity systems evaluated from rain rate time series

Satellite communications are expanding into higher frequencies bands in order to fulfil growing capacity requirements. As it is well known, frequencies beyond 10 GHz are subject to rain attenuation along the propagation path, which in turn increases the system outage probability. These effects are particularly severe for heavy rainfall regions (e.g. tropical regions). Several Propagation Impairment Mitigation Techniques (PIMTs) exist to cope with these impairments, such as power control, signal processing and diversity. A cost-effective countermeasure that can be applied under the conditions described above is time diversity. In this work, the rain attenuation time series is simulated through the Satellite Synthetic Storm Technique (S-SST), its input is the rain-rate time series provided by four rain gauges located in the equatorial city of Guayaquil, Ecuador. Finally, the performance of the time diversity technique is statistically evaluated through the diversity gain and relative diversity gain parameters, calculated as a function of retransmission delay for different system availability levels. Results demonstrate an overall enhance in the system performance.