Rain Attenuation Prediction Model Based on Hyperbolic Cosecant Copula for Multiple Site Diversity Systems in Satellite Communications

This paper presents a novel model for prediction of site diversity system performance in millimeter-wave satellite communications. The model predicts the joint exceedance probability of rain attenuation based on a new family of Archimedean copulas, called the hyperbolic cosecant copula. Furthermore, employing the hierarchical Archimedean copula structures, the proposed methodology can be used for the prediction of joint first-order statistics of rain attenuation for dual- and multiple-site diversity satellite communication systems. The proposed method has been tested on an extensive data set of site diversity experiments with various system configurations. Moreover, in addition to the common approaches, where the dependence of rain attenuation induced on multiple links is based solely on the distance between ground stations, elevation and baseline angle are also taken into account for the modeling of the dependence parameter. Both versions of the model outperform the existing model for two-site diversity systems given in the ITU-R Recommendation P.618-12. The version, which accounts for the system's angles, shows a better performance also in comparison with the state-of-the-art models such as the models based on the Archimedean Clayton copula and the Gaussian copula.