Combined switched beamforming and cell-site diversity for rain fading mitigation in LMDS networks

An investigation on the latent advantages of switched beamforming combined with cell-site diversity in the context of millimeter-wave local multipoint distribution service (LMDS) systems is presented in this paper. Rain attenuation is the major fading mechanism in such systems over the frequency range above 25 GHz. A moving rain cell is randomly generated in an LMDS network to analyze the system performance using the proposed switched beamforming combined with cell-site diversity scheme. The average outage probability under various random rain shower profiles is analysed. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme gives better performance in terms of average outage probability.