Rain attenuation hitting time statistical distribution: Application to Fade Mitigation Techniques of Future Satellite Communication Systems

Rain attenuation is the dominant fading mechanism for Future Broadband Satellite Communication Systems (operating at Ku band and above). In this paper, hitting time statistics of rain attenuation process are presented using a well accepted dynamic model. Hitting time gives the time needed for a stochastic process to exit an interval of thresholds given the initial value. The expression to compute analytically the Complementary Cumulative Distribution Function (CCDF) of hitting times for rain attenuation is given. Moreover, the employment of hitting time statistics in designing Fade Mitigation Techniques (FMTs) is proposed and a discussion of how these statistics can be used for the FMT control loop is made. The FMTs under consideration for the application of hitting time statistics are the power control, adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) and time diversity. Furthermore, numerical results are presented showing that the theoretical model actually reproduces the hitting time statistics and finally some useful conclusions are drawn.