Multi satellite MIMO systems at Ka band and above: Outage capacity analysis using bivariate IG distribution

In this paper, novel analytical expressions are presented for the computation of the outage capacity statistics for a MIMO satellite system operating at Ku band and above, using spatial multiplexing technique. More particularly, the effect of rain attenuation in MIMO systems operating at millimeter wave frequencies is investigated. The bivariate Inverse Gaussian (IG) distribution is used for the modeling of joint long term statistics of the converging slant paths. The performance of the system is compared also to well-known diversity combining schemes, such as Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) and Selection Combining (SC) techniques. In the Numerical Results Section it is shown that the performance of a 2×2 parallel MIMO is higher comparing to a single satellite and to dual combining diversity schemes. Moreover, the performance of MRC and the 2×2 MIMO satellite scheme is similar for low values of SNR. Finally, some useful conclusions are drawn.