Prediction of the outage performance of an orbital diversity Earth-space communication system

Orbital diversity is one method to reduce the rain outage time for the satellite systems operating at frequencies above 10 GHz. The Morita and Higuti (1978) model for the prediction of site diversity performance is modified to include the case of orbital diversity. The development of the methodology follows two independent models for stratiform and convective rain. The methodology uses the assumption of log-normal distribution for the representation of the point rainfall rate statistics. Numerical results taken from the proposed procedure are tested with a set of corresponding data from an operating Earth-space system located in Italy. Some conclusions concerning the influence of the rainfall spatial structure on the outage performance or an orbital diversity system are deduced