Characteristics of 5G wireless millimeter wave propagation: Transformation of rain attenuation applying different prediction models

The performance of rain rate and rain attenuation prediction models are vital for planning wireless networks consisting of millimeter wave links. As several different prediction models exist in literature we give a comparison of the performance of the most applied ones. Moreover, we introduce methods for transforming rain attenuation between different millimeter wave links based on the investigated prediction models. This transformation enables the exploitation of long-range link measurements to effectively plan networks comprised of short-range millimeter wave links (like 5G mesh networks). We identify the most suitable rain attenuation prediction model and verify the proposed transformation model with the ITU-P.530-15 model on long-term statistics. The purpose of this paper is to investigate different rain attenuation prediction models for terrestrial links and to find a suitable prediction method to perform a transformation of rain attenuation on millimeter wave links with different physical parameters (length, frequency, and polarization).